(My 0-10 rating: 8)
Genre: Thriller
Director: Paul Greengrass
Screenwriter: Brian Helgeland
Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdalla
Time: 1 hr., 55 min.
Rating: R (for violence and vulgarity)
Bang! Boom! Rat-a-tat-tat! Steeped in the beginnings of the Iraq War, right about when Bush made his famously naive "Mission Accomplished!" speech, "Green Zone" is a brutally spectacular thriller that makes its point by meaningful mega-action.
That speech, which we may recall was made in the wishful-thinking aftermath of a massive U.S.-led coalition crushing of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, supposed that because Hussein had been defeated militarily, peace had descended upon the country. In fact it had not, for the warring Shiite, Sunni, Baathist and Kurd factions were already into civil war and preparing for a huge escalation of it, with our GIs in the crossfire.
Matt Damon, here an army investigator, is up to his charisma from his Bourne Identity films, this film demanding, and getting from him, a ramrod, supercharged hero who frenetically pummels the planners of his actions in Washington with urgent requests for reasons behind what they're ordering him to do. We get it immediately that at his street level of operations in Baghdad, the bitterly competing factions have him in a super-perilous situation because he is moving outside the mandates under which he's supposed to be operating.
The film becomes a barrage of hostile action rendered in supersonic editing, every one- to three-second cut blazing across your vision with intrinsic impact at stratospheric levels of emotional shock.
Yet none of the action is at all gratuitous, all is geared tightly to the needs of the moment. It is integrated and boldly honest and consistently human.
Now consider Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon). When his latest assignment, involving finding the alleged WMDs lead him to a reported biological weapons facility, it turns out to be a toilet factory. Like, he's had it. One CIA official, (Brendan Gleeson), taking due note of Roy's upset over what he charges are continuing bad intelligence reports, is convinced, along with Roy, that's there's something very suspicious going on here at the Pentagon.
And for Roy, this is pretty much the last straw. For it seems that he's becoming aware that he's been jerked around all over the place by his lying superior officers, by his uncooperative underlings, and by Freddy, the one-legged Iraqi civilian whom he recruits as translator and escort. It's high time, he figures, to cut loose from these unproductive assignments and get down to some serious sources that can point the way to the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Seems there's a curiously coded notebook involved here, this being the key to setting Roy's big trackdown into gear. The big issue, of course, which the film will exploit at its fullest, is that well-remembered search for those elusive WMDs which didn't exist but were always given as the reason for Bush's invasion of Iraq.
The film elaborates that the existence of WMDs was actually a matter of irrelevance to the Bush administration; they simply would, if actually existent, have justified the opening of the war. Bush's real purpose, goes the story we recollect and which the film spells out, was to stabilize the Middle East, by setting up a democracy and having us seen as liberators. (Politically savvy sources have suggested that the war also made it look like Bush was fighting terrorism -- 25% of Americans still believe that Hussein had something to do with 9/11 -- since the real perpetrator of that catastrophe, Osama Bin Laden, had outwitted Bush's pursuit.)
The film does run into some contradiction with reality in one of its characters, the Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), who apparently is supposed to a representation of the real-life New York Times writer Judith Miller. The latter was criticized at the time for her becoming an apologist and supporter of Bush, she then going over to Fox News. But while Miller, now a Fox News commentator associated with the right-wing Manhattan Institute, the film's character Dayne is portrayed as well-meaning but naive in hyping it up for Roy.
Some of the film is downright nerve-wracking. Roy's investigation will lead him into a dark torture-chamber where prisoners are mauled almost to death under demands for information.
And, of course, as he gets closer and closer to the truth, the darkness, both figuratively and in the reality of the film's photography toward the end, tension builds to spellbinding levels.
The suspense that has permeated the film from the very beginning (shot in Morocco, Spain and England) rises to charged dimension at the end.
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