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Those of us who regard Brian De Palma as a great, misunderstood American director revere him for the same qualities, more or less, that make his detractors crazy. That is to say, it is impossible for him to make a movie without calling a lot of attention to the mechanics and artifice of making movies.

Like a kid who won't dive into a pool without collaring the glances of every grown-up present, De Palma revels in look-at-me moments: protracted, self-consciously virtuoso set pieces that shout "technique" to the least cinema-savvy members in the audience.

"Redacted," his scalding and simplistic cri de couer on the American occupation in Iraq, is every bit as show-offy as such popcorn-De Palma diversions as "Snake Eyes" and "The Untouchables." This time, however, the technical virtuosity is systematically veiled in the rough-hewn visual language of amateurs and journalist drones.

De Palma tracks the events surrounding the rape-murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers — a horrific, truth-based incident that he relays to us entirely through the surveillance tools of the story's participant-observers. These include a soldier's video diary, a blog by an anxious military wife, Iraqi news reports and insurgent Web sites that chronicle beheadings and bombings with lurid self-satisfaction. The sole pretender to art (and the only one that contains a dishonest point-of-view shot) is a poker-faced, Handel-drenched French documentary on daily life at an American-monitored checkpoint.

Such mediated storytelling has already become a cliché of independent movies. In this case, the déjà vu is thickened by De Palma's self-referential scenario, which divvies up a squad of American soldiers "Casualties of War"-style between the amoral bad apples, the men of conscience and the non-judgmental bystanders.

The latter are primarily represented by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a genial, loquacious kid with film-school dreams and a camera that refuses to quit, even when his buddies are raping a 15-year-old and gunning down her family. De Palma wants to say that the war's Salazars (and by implication, complacent American citizens) are culpable in atrocities by their do-nothing watchfulness.

But he reduces the insidious complexity of complicity by the sheer perniciousness of his two troublemakers, Flake and Rush (Patrick Carroll and Daniel Stewart Sherman), whose hedonistic, Beavis and Butthead shallowness conceals the souls of natural born criminals.

Flake and Rush are leering jocks of the type that would have made life miserable back in high school for De Palma's famously bedeviled prom queen, Carrie. They succeed in doing as much for fellow members of their squad, two of whom meet gruesome ends and another who will be traumatized for life as a result of their heartless, mindless actions. De Palma shoots himself in the foot, however, by over-empowering these thugs; the message that we take away is that it really is just the bad apples who make for a bad war.

De Palma is a bold, efficient writer, capable of drawing vivid characters with lean strokes. But "Redacted" feels, if anything, too written.

De Palma's outrage — toward the war, toward the ridiculous way in which the producers redacted actual Iraq war photos at the film's end — is admirable. If righteous indignation was the most direct highway to art, "Redacted" would be his masterpiece.