rendier than writer strikes, the Iraq Conflict gets yet another cinematic castigation care of Brian De Palma’s Redacted. Unlike last week’s ineffective proselytization, Lions for Lambs, Redacted eschews staid rhetoric in favour of a media tapestry that fictionalizes last year’s Mahmudiyah murders. Its graphic treatment of true events and controversial closing montage of mostly real images will cause premature departures, shielded eyes, and post-viewing debates. However, thanks to its ironically distancing, faux-authentic style; incidences of overtly contrived dialogue; and a handful of stilted performances, the provocative, even resonant docudrama falls flat, losing its message in its medium.

Redacted linearly follows a troupe of American soldiers before, during, and after they rape and burn a 14 year old Iraqi girl and murder her and her family (it’s standard Holiday fare). Though the setting, characters, and aftermath have changed, the end result and many sundry details remain mostly faithful to the Mahmudiyah crime. It treads on similar ground as De Palma’s 1989 Vietnam War drama, Casualties of War, which itself was loosely based on the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese girl. Like Casualties - but without Sean Penn - Redacted deals with apathy, ignorance, inaction, and atrocity. Additionally, it chastises the indifferent public and ineffective media to varying degrees of success.

Redacted weaves together a soldier-shot account, a French documentary - complete with shots of beautiful boredom - quasi-YouTube rants, e-chats, a taped beheading, and news casts from a fictional Al Jazeera stand-in. Though the 35mm-shot French doc sees sweat-beads slowly descending down sun-kissed faces and ants overwhelming a scorpion, all coloured by a vibrant earth-tone palette, the majority of the film eschews visual flare in favour of pseudo-realism.

At their best, faux-docs connote This is Spinal Tap and, at their worst, they conjure thoughts of reality television. De Palma’s film tries to redefine the medium by injecting it with a shot of moral magnitude. However, because of viewer familiarity with CNN and YouTube, counterfeit versions distract in the same way that sports flicks about fantasy teams (see Any Given Sunday) feel unnatural.