Redacted has become one of the most controversial films of the season and a lot of it is courtesy of a man who hasn't even seen the latest work from Brian De Palma. Gasbag Bill O’Reilly has tried to take producer Mark Cuban to task over financing the film without even checking it out for himself. Bill-O has even hysterically claimed that former administrations would have locked up Cuban for making a film that he knows, once again, sight unseen, is anti-soldier. The funny thing is that O’Reilly may be dead wrong to criticize a film that not only hasn’t he seen but he targets purely for political and sensational reasons, but he’s not wrong in the way you might think. Redacted isn’t anti-soldier, it’s anti-humanity.

Redacted uses a number of different styles (the most interesting thing about the film is De Palma’s clear fascination with new forms of media) to tell the partially true story of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl in Samarra. We meet a group of soldiers who have been assigned to a military checkpoint and are slowly going crazy. De Palma uses one of the men as his "filmmaker," a soldier with a camera who is recording his experiences in Iraq. He also intercuts footage of YouTube clips, Iraqi news broadcasts, a documentary being filmed in the area, and more, to ostensibly add to the realism of the proceedings. It’s interesting to see the recently-stale director play with a mishmash of media but the decision backfires. It’s possible that if De Palma had stuck to one style, the realism could have been effective, but the use of different modern media outlets feels showy and draws too much attention to the many flaws of the film.

The best way to explain those flaws might be through an imaginary conversation about something as complicated and multi-layered as the human capacity for violence. Over the course of this 90 minute discussion, you and I could talk the issue to death, bringing up quotes, studies, and other evidence to support the conversation. Or we could just look at graphic pictures of acts of violence and get an emotional, cathartic response to the horrors that man can perpetrate against man. There’s a third extreme option, one neither as cold as pure discussion nor as hot as graphic evidence and it’s that I could just punch you in the face for an hour-and-a-half. If we went with that choice, you’d have an idea of what it would be like to sit through Redacted, Brian De Palma’s latest vile experiment of a film, a theatrical experience with almost no redeeming value. De Palma, a man who should know better after years in the industry, goes with the brute force option in trying to raise awareness of the horrors of what is going on in Iraq. Is it ugly and awful over there? Absolutely. Does anyone deserve to be beaten over the head with that fact for 90 minutes? Not at all.

Brian De Palma thinks his choice to pull NO punches in Redacted - it contains some of the most brutal imagery I’ve ever seen in a film, including a reenactment of a beheading of an American soldier - is warranted under the argument that what’s going on over there is just as bad, if not worse than what you’re seeing on-screen. That may be true, but it doesn’t make for a good film. And the fact that the story De Palma has chosen is only partially true makes his more extreme decisions feel that much more sadistic. A film needs to be more than just a recreation of horror to be effective in the same way that the conversation about violence would be much more effective than actually committing it. It’s no exaggeration to say that sitting through Redacted feels like someone is committing violence against you.

Watching a 15-year-old get raped and a soldier get beheaded isn’t enough for De Palma. He ends his film with a montage of actual images from Iraq that are some of the most disturbing things you’ll ever see. As if he feels he hasn’t yet made his point, he kicks you in the gut while you’re lying on the ground. One of the many media choices that De Palma uses in Redacted is an Al-Qaeda website that proudly displays footage of the soldiers in the film being killed. Of course, De Palma would never defend putting that kind of actual footage online in real life, but never seems to have asked himself if recreating it under the guise of cinema was that much better.