Movie Review: Green Zone

Matt Damon is Roy Miller, a U. S. Army warrant officer in charge of finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) in Iraq. We all know the United States declared war based on some very questionable “intelligence”. Miller, frantic and frustrated by his failed searches, is one of the few people in the movie who actually cares whether this so called intelligence is true or not. Green Zone is based on the bestselling nonfiction book by Rajiv Chandrasekara, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone". The book is a tension filled page turner that I assume accurately depicts the horrifying confusion that characterized the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The movie is directed by Paul Greengrass who also directed (and wrote) the riveting, United 93. This is an excellent example of how two movies with known storylines and outcomes can succeed or fail at generating tension. United 93 was almost unwatchable because of its realism and the palpable anxiety created by Greengrass and the small group of relatively unknown actors (Khalid Abdalla is in both – he is Freddy, the one legged man in GZ and a terrorist in United). I never felt tension in the Green Zone even though a tremendous amount of effort went into attempting to create it. Maybe I’m just a little tired of the shaky-camera technique used instead of a good screenplay and good acting to create intensity. As an educational piece, Green Zone succeeds. We learn about the possible and probable, ins and outs of this charade carried out by the Bush administration to fool the world into believing Iraq was hiding WMD’s. What else is new? The movie looks real. Production started in Spain, was moved to Morocco and the filming was finished up in the UK. Kudos to the set designers and cinematographers for making this film look authentic. Damon is not at his best and the character is too close to Jason Bourne to let us forget it. Greg Kinnear is good as the sleazy Pentagon Intelligence Officer and orchestrator of this scam. If you want a visual for how this country got into the Iraq war, then the Green Zone will work for you. If you have read and heard enough, skip it.

p.s. The real Green Zone is the heavily guarded diplomatic/government area of closed-off streets in central Baghdad where U.S. occupation authorities live and work. It includes the main palaces of former President Saddam Hussein. The area houses the civilian ruling authority run by the Americans and British and the offices of major U.S. consulting companies.