Redacted

Brian de Palma

Madman Entertainment 2008

R4 DVD

Brian de Palma has set out in this film to reconstruct an incident in March 2006 in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, when a U.S. soldier raped a girl and murdered her family. The story involves a group of soldiers manning an unimportant checkpoint, and is told in a semi-documentary form using (reenacted) clips from a soldier’s video camera, a visiting news team’s footage, and TV footage from Iraqi insurgents. The style is effective. The soldier’s own film particularly shows the day to day boredom of manning the checkpoint under constant tension and scorching heat, unappreciated by the locals who don’t even speak English and treat the soldiers with reserve. The soldiers are a fairly rough bunch, ranging from the soldier with the camera who wants to use his pay to go to a film college, to homicidal rednecks who appear to enjoy being able to brutalize and kill people.

There are few breaks in the daily boring routine, apart from when the sergeant sits on an improvised explosive device or when a confused driver who doesn’t understand their hand signals is machine gunned when he doesn’t stop at the checkpoint. A pregnant woman dies in the shooting, but the soldier’s reaction is unthinking happiness that he has now got his first kill. In the soldiers’ minds the local people are something less than human, so it is not surprising that a small group sets out to rape a young woman who regularly goes through their checkpoint. Everyone in the family is murdered. Insurgents then kidnap and kill one of the soldiers in reprisal.

Apart from highlighting the problem of controlling the soldiers, there seems to be little point in the film. It has won major awards, but does it really have anything new to say? The Mahmudiyah incident was widely reported at the time, so de Palma is not revealing secrets. The lowering of standards for the military is likewise no secret, and with the lowering of standards comes a lessening of ethics. Boredom between actions leads to mischief, and this is also not new. Those who see it as an anti-U.S. film are, I think, reading too much into it.

I can, however, see the film as a powerful commentary on the problems of keeping garrison forces in a foreign environment. It is not, as some would think (and as de Palma possibly intended), an anti-war film either. There are no heroes on either side. Similar atrocities have occurred in war down through the centuries, and many, like this one, were not in battle. NoGun-Ri in Korea and My Lai in Vietnam are only two examples where U.S. troops were in the wrong, so Mahmudiyah is not an isolated incident. Perhaps the film should be seen as a reminder that “our boys over there” can be just as ruthless and wantonly homicidal as the men they are fighting, to counterpoint the jingoistic uncritical patriotism that is all over the Internet.

In spite of this, it is still an extremely good film of a soldier’s daily life in Iraq. Because it is so hard to draw conclusions from the film, it seems a little vague and undefined, but isn’t that what the Iraq war really is? At least we get to see a pretty good reenactment of the military life, and perhaps this helps us understand why atrocities like Mahmudiyah happen.

This review will appear in Volume 2:1 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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