Redacted
“Cinema is lies 24 frames per second.” (Brian De Palma – and, Google tells me, others – but he was the first I heard say it) – something you really need to be aware of before going into this.
Someone on the IMDb whines that De Palma already made this movie 20 years ago with Casualties of War. Like that’s a bad thing. Casualties of War is one of my favourite movies, and De Palma’s filmography really hasn’t excited me too much since Snake Eyes, (though I still haven’t seen the only movie that did intrigue me, Femme Fatale) so I was really looking forward to this. Incidentally, not to mention that this whole connection was at least noted even on the poster for the movie …
I can’t deny, there is a sense of “yeh, tell us something we don’t know already,” about it – and it couldn’t be more structurally similar to Casualties if it tried. This by no means stops it from being one of the more powerful movies of the year, though, and heck if I wasn’t in tears over the last few moments. One of the best things I’ve read about the movie was how it feels less like a shameless retread of Casualties than simply Brian De Palma stripping away the cinematic gloss of that movie in sheer infuriation by the fact that such a masterpiece didn’t stop history from repeating itself. What it lacks in emotional punch during the war and rape scenes compared to Casualties, it almost makes up for in pure near-unwatchable rawness. In any case, there’s a lot to talk about here, and it’s a movie that will change as time goes by.
One caveat, of course: if you’re among those who think we should blindly accept that all soldiers in Iraq are doing God’s work and that to suggest otherwise about a select few would tar the whole army with the same brush? Absolutely, positively, avoid at all costs.