Matt Damon in Paul Greengrass' Green Zone
hen Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass teamed up the first two times, for "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum," the results were terrific. They gave the spy genre a desperately-needed kick in the ass, and legitimized shaky, handheld camera use for the mainstream. It's tragic, then, that their latest effort, the much-delayed "Green Zone," is such an enormous step backwards, in terms of the acting, the filmmaking, and worst of all, the writing.
Damon is Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, tasked with locating WMDs in Baghdad shortly after the start of the Iraq war. He's a tenacious bulldog, unafraid to send his men in front of sniper fire in the hopes of securing the stuff we went to combat over in the first place. But he's so single-minded that he has a tendency to bark rather than speak. When CIA man Martin Brown (Brendan Gleason) tells him that the reasons they're there are complicated, Miller says, "Not to me." But every site they hit is empty. It's clear the intelligence they're getting is faulty, and Miller's getting tired of using the standard chain of command.
That chain of command goes as high as Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), Washington's lead administrator is Baghdad. He's being hounded by "Wall Street Journal" reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) over Magellan, a secret source who has been feeding the Americans WMD locations, and who she quoted frequently during the rush to war. Poundstone's trying to keep order, and at his disposal he has special operations heavy Briggs (Jason Isaacs, wasted here) and his black-clad storm troopers.
There's no reason anything in this situation should change, until Freddy, (Khalid Abdalla), an Iraqi man, spots General Al Rawi, also known as the Jack of Clubs, having a meeting with his subordinates. He relays the info to Miller, who promptly conscripts him as an interpreter, and the chase for the missing general is on. The question is, who's gonna get him? Miller and the CIA, who are starting to think that there might not be any WMDs in Iraq after all, and that the American public might have been sold a very expensive bill of goods, or Poundstone and Briggs, who would like to keep those ideas quiet.
So, here's the deal. What these guys have done is utterly simplified everything that led up to the war in Iraq, by creating a seriously revised history that takes selective bits of reality into account. You may have sorted out that Poundstone is based on L. Paul Bremer, and that Dayne is Judith Miller of the "New York Times." But it essentially puts the war at their feet, leaving no culpability for the real villains, guys like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,, Condoleeza Rice, and George W. Bush. It uses real events to create a fictitious timeline, and Greengrass' style, which worked so well in the Bourne films, reduces it to little more than a first-person shooter. "Green Zone" has more in common with the "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" video game franchise than the war itself. Perhaps worst of all, it defines history that we already know to be true in a terrible theatrical context, muddying the waters of reality with hopes of a great opening weekend take at the box office. It's a film that comes far too late, as the country seems to have already moved back to Afghanistan as the popular war. And not only does it not look at the real reasons we're in Iraq from a perspective that makes sense, it actually mitigates an enormous amount of dishonesty on the part of Washington politicians by trying to keep things tidy and within frame. That, to me, is dishonest filmmaking, and to make a big-budget film that is dishonest about what we know to be a dishonest war is reprehensible. You want modern warfare, buy a video game. Skip this movie.
Green Zone (2009)
Genre: Drama
Release Date: 3/12/2010 (Wide) (Showtimes and Tickets)
Studio: Universal Pictures
CAST & CREW:
Starring: Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Yigal Naor, Khalid Abdalla
Directed By: Paul Greengrass
Written By: Brian Helgeland based on the book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Produced By: Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner
