![]() They were all actual at one point, but now some of them are staged, and others have been altered by having faces obscured by a black marker pen, lest the subjects' privacy be violated. You may be vaguely aware of a controversy involving De Palma and some of his own footage that was "redacted." This involved the montage of "actual" photographs from Iraq, which close the film. This is something Angel Salazar finds out during the filming of his documentary, although unfortunately his key footage is redacted in a very direct way. Now that some 200,000 Iraqis have died in the war, for whatever reason and at whatever hands, it is hard to see how many of the rest would be as grateful for our presence as we are assured they are. "Redacted" is a metaphor for what De Palma and others believe is the fatal flaw of our Iraq strategy: You cannot enforce "freedom" at gunpoint. How if you put men in a hellhole and arm them, and if they are predisposed to violence, they will not always follow the rules, or even remember them. De Palma uses the method to demonstrate how good (or neutral) soldiers can be turned into criminals or silent accomplices by a threat of violence from their comrades. What is different in this film is the visual style, which informs us by its very nature that after the invention of the cheap video camera and the Internet, few actions can be assumed to be secret. Fox played a Vietnam soldier who turned away from a rape. Much of this action mirrors the events in an earlier De Palma film, " Casualties of War" (1989), in which Michael J. Company members are informed by Flake and Rush that if they don't keep quiet, they will die. In response, the two men who fired on the car (Rush, played by Daniel Stewart Sherman, and the well-named Flake, played by Patrick Carroll) lead a nighttime raid during which a 15-year-old girl is raped, her family is murdered and their house set afire. In retribution, one of the company's members is killed by local militia. They open fire, and a pregnant woman and her unborn child are killed. The story comes down to this: The soldiers of Alfa Company are manning a checkpoint. #Non redacted movieA good plan, but if you notice that the movie is set in Samarra, you may recall the parable of the man whose best-laid plans went wrong there. The film explains the origin of much of its footage by introducing us to a soldier named Angel Salazar ( Izzy Diaz), who carries a digital video camera and thinks maybe he can make a documentary to get him into film school. In a similar fashion, a "rendition" can be a kidnapping and torture. "Redacted" is a word simply meaning "edited" and is often used by the military as a way of calling a simple act by an objective, and therefore defused, name. So we would be forced to, if the movie's buried message is clear. ![]()
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