This is a fiction account because the producer was forbidden to produce anything else, but this is how US troops behave all around the world & we should know about it......more power to Palma.

I saw this film years ago but just got around to commenting after watching the DVD with a friend.This is the best, most brutally honest look at the murderous farce of United States corporate driven occupation of Iraq that has ever been made. It puts the tepid, kid's gloves, one-sided sentimentality of Hurt Locker to shame. And that's why it only has 6 stars for a general rating. It deserves 10 just for its in-your-face depiction of reality."Redacted" is a story told both too soon and right on time.How long after the senseless slaughter in Viet Nam did it take for films like Platoon, Born On The 4th Of July and Full Metal Jacket to say what everyone already knew. That we were wrong. They still haven't made the long over-due film about My Lai. When it comes to Iraq, Americans are still in the rationalization phase, not ready to deal with the fact we invaded and occupied a country that a) never did anything to us, b) didn't have the weapons Bush Inc claimed and c) we had already betrayed during the uprising following the Gulf Invasion. We are still not ready to come to grips with the fact our invasion has likely lead to the deaths of millions of innocent citizens; "sand n***ers", the latest in a long line of 'n***ers' we have dehumanized to justify the brutality of our policies.We're still lauding the films that tell us the deaths aren't our fault, that our troops are great guys doing a hard job and when something goes wrong it's just the confusion of a poorly understood situation... that our intentions are pure because we're Americans.This disconnect is best exemplified in a classic scene when one of the soldiers is at a celebration of his return home and his friends ask him to tell some war stories. He hesitates but they insist. Then he unleashes his true feelings about the horror and lies of Iraq and the secret that eats at his soul: the rape and murder of an Iraqi child by his fellow soldiers. There is a moment of confused silence, then in the truly disconnected style of most civvies, one of his friends offers up a toast to the "war hero" and the room applauds as the camera fades on the stricken face of a good man who was tricked into becoming a murderer.Disconnected. Desperately clinging to any rationale that will subdue the unacknowledged guilt that eats like a cancer at our national consciousness. And those who don't feel it; they are the worst among us.That's why this film was too soon.And it was right on time because if there was ever a period that this country needed to do some serious soul searching, since the days of slavery and acts of genocide against the native inhabitants of these lands... now is that time.When this film starts getting the kudos it deserves, it might indicate the soul searching is in progress. Not holding my breath though.

The film is simple and direct and does not necessitate a long story to tell the "plot" or the "drama". In Iraq the Americans are doing a bad job. In that case, a small squadron is pacifying a small zone. One day two or three of them get berserk and they invade a house, arrest one man, and then later, at night, they will come back to rape a fifteen year old girl and they will kill everyone, mother, father, grandfather and smaller sister. It will come out, especially after the insurgents capture one man of this small unit and plainly slaughter him with a knife and behead him. The film shows how no justice will come out of that story and even the GI who will reveal the story on the Internet will become the real culprit for the investigating unit. He will end up guilty in his mind forever after he is released from his military position. He will always considers himself as the one who saw one girl being raped, killed and then burnt while her whole family was being assassinated and he did nothing because one of the killers gave him the order to get out and stand watch in the street and he obeyed. There is no clean war. War is always dirty, but there are some wars where we can find some justification for that dirt, be it patriotic or defensive, or whatever. In this case there is no justification though we could give volumes of explanations. It would amount to nothing but that: take young males away from their natural environment, put them in a hostile and completely different environment, lock them up in cramped housing conditions forcing the most extreme promiscuity onto them and among them, without any kind of sexual satisfaction possible in a country like Iraq where prostitution could not even be thought of, and either they accept to satisfy their hunger within their promiscuity, one way or another often leading to inner conflicts and fights, or by forcing their sexual needs onto unwilling women outside, young if possible of course. Just sending human beings in such conditions is a crime against humanity and war should be banned. But the worst part of it is that this war was entirely decided against the better judgment of the whole world and exclusively justified with lies hammered onto us by a bunch a liars. You can imagine then how horrifying the vision of the last still images of collateral victims can be.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

I am never going to forget this film. Not for as long as I live. Not for as long as I hold onto the love of cinema that I have always struggled so hard to keep kindled—keep burning—through anything; through thick and thin; through the lack of interest in film-making circulating in the grade schools, middle schools and high schools that I passed through and graduated from; through the overwhelming political apathy that has stung the state of Missouri in which I reside. It has been a long time since a contemporary film has held up a mirror to my face and shown me the kind of thinker, viewer, and audience member that I am. I found such a film in Redacted. It was the Brian De Palma film that I had always waited for. It is still the fiery, passionate film that will haunt me, provoke me, and perhaps even influence me when my future career comes knocking.But again: when our troops need our support at all times in order to help them win in a dangerous conflict, what good is there to tell a story that is not flattering—even if it is based on an incident that really happened? "It's a very sad story", De Palma admitted, but then he broke the ice by declaring of the film, "(that) you feel sorry for, obviously, the victims, but also the soldiers! Even the crazy ones! What got them that way?" That reminds me of the acting in the film itself. Medved called the acting "atrocious" in his review, while A. O. Scott, a liberal, wrote, "... most of the actors, many of them appearing for the first time in a feature film, lack either the skill or the directorial guidance to endow their characters with a full range of credible motives and responses." Both of these criticisms completely miss the point of De Palma's method, which is to prove that people who talk in front of home video cameras don't always act the way they might in real life; Roger Ebert correctly noted in his review (one of the better reviews of the film), that, because the acting of the film is less than flawless, it seems more real. In another positive review, Scott Foundas (who even went so far as to hail Redacted as one of the ten best films of the year) wrote, "...it is the entire point of Redacted that we are observing crude, found video objects, and that their subjects, aware of the camera that's recording them, assume the awkwardly self-conscious stances of people in vacation pictures and birthday-party videos." There are, however, moments when the acting in Redacted shines, and these moments almost always stem from the performance of Rob Devaney as McCoy. Those who say that Redacted is anti-troops obviously don't pay much attention to the McCoy character, who cannot hold back the guilt of witnessing and doing nothing to stop the rape, and finally decides that justice must be done. We are there with him every step of the way. As with Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War, we are rooting for him, and we sympathize with his guilt."Redacted deals with very moving material in a very new form," expressed De Palma in an interview with Simon Hattenstone, "and it may take a while for people to adjust to it. In time, they will come to accept it because all the information the Bush administration has been suppressing will come out, and we'll learn the terrible stories that they've been hiding from us for so long. Whether it finds it this year or in years to come, I just think the movie will find its audience." Will it really? I think so. Because our troops are still stationed in Iraq, it may be hard for some to appreciate the film when our reasons for occupying the country are still vastly unknown. But I also think Redacted will be admired, in time, because it is almost as if De Palma's career was preparing itself every step of the way for this film. When all the other directors chickened out, he responded by making a film that took U.S. occupation in Iraq head-on, no matter how many it troubled or offended. He was also willing to live with the painful consequences of what the characters—those of whom are still alive at the end—have survived. "I went on a raid in Samarra", confesses McCoy, now breaking down, "and two men from my unit raped and killed a fifteen-year old girl; and burned her body... and I didn't do anything to stop it." McCoy may have been unsuccessful, but De Palma found something else. He made Redacted, and with that, made one of the most perfectly constructed masterpieces of his career. For over forty years, Brian De Palma has been recognized as the modern Hitchcock and as a survivor of the Movie Brat era. In two years, he will be recognized as the filmmaker who ended the war.