Redacted

This sincere but extremely uneven anti-war statement from veteran director Brian De Palma bears some similarity to his acclaimed 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War, in which a group of American soldiers rape and kill a Vietnamese girl. Here, in a story based on an actual incident, the servicemen are stationed in Iraq and gang rape and kill an Iraqi girl. Sadly, other comparisons with the director's previous film are mostly unfavourable. De Palma's decision to tell the story through a collage of digital video supposedly shot by the soldiers, as well as staged CCTV footage and internet news stories, is ingenious - after all, this is the first war to be almost universally recorded and then posted on the internet by the people fighting it. But his choice of working with unknown or nonprofessional actors, together with his typical lack of emotional attachment, take the edge off what is undeniably a gruelling movie to watch.