Green Zone (Tuesday, August 10, 2010) (97)

Green Zone is an action film that really should just be an office drama. Army Chief Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is in charge of a team of soldiers searching for weapons of mass destruction cashes in Baghdad in the early days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Every time they're sent on a mission, his team comes up blank finding absolutely nothing. Miller gets upset and seeks help from CIA spook Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a Middle-East expert who doubts the source of the Pentagon's intelligence.

It seems that Brown and Clarke Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), the Pentagon intelligence head, are bitter rivals. Brown doesn't like how political Poundstone is and how he has not put in adequate time in the region. When Miller and his team come upon a secret Baathist meeting and arrest a few of the minor players a series of events leads him (and us) to doubt the entire reason for going into the war.

There is really no need for any action or any gunfighting in the film at all. Most of the interesting action is the discovery of different layers of deception they Pentagon went through in the build-up to the war. That there are car chases and explosions, not to mention helicopter heroics, seems sorta beside the point of the movie. Most of the time, the chases are teams of American soldiers chasing other American soldiers - not really bad guys chasing good guys, but guys with one mission chasing guys with a different mission. (Morals are strangely never discussed after Miller kills some fellow solders who chase him - killing comrades generally being something the Army frowns upon).

The film is very anti-Bush and anti-war, to the point that it's all a bit silly. Director Paul Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland show how extremely guilty the architects for the war are of starting such a campaign and not having any idea of how to fight it. Once it becomes clear that the case for war was entirely made up, Poundstone basically says, "so - sue me!" He goes off largely without any punishment.

Making this all even more strange is that the details of the film are presented as fact, yet I'm not sure these things actually happened. Certainly the case for the war and the suggestion of WMDs was mostly fabricated, but it never came out that the Pentagon invented intel sources to prove their case. As far as I know, the amazingly named "Curveball" (who said that Saddam met with Al Qaeda in Prague) has been largely dismissed as a fabulist, but never outed as an invented person.

The film was adapted from the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran - but it seems like it was mostly written fresh by Helgeland with some light inspiration from the book. In one scene when Miller goes to the main palace in the Green Zone and sees American diplomats drinking and playing games by the pool as if they were on vacation. This is about all the movie has to do with the book. Overall Greengrass' style, with handheld cameras and a very immediate point of view, helps to underline the reality and non-fiction-ness of the story, but I think this is rather unfair to the uninformed viewer.

The end result of this film feels to me like Greengrass and Helgeland (or someone else) wanted to make an anti-war movie and the studio said they could only do it if it was an action flick. In the end it's not really a good action flick (it's too heady and the action isn't really thrilling because there aren't really any bad guys) and it's sorta a silly spy movie (because the spying has already been done and now we're just trying to put the pieces together about what happened).

Considering this, it is a lot of fun to see a movie tell the truth about the Iraq war and show how everything from the lies told during the build-up to the war, to the mismanagement of the troops, to the horseshit stories we were fed about WMDs once we got there, to the disastrous decision by Paul Bremer to fire the Iraqi Army all add up to a massively terrible situation. The film reminds us of how guilty people like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, Pearle, Wolfowitz and all their underlings are. Sadly, it tells us these things underneath totally dumb gunfire.

Stars: 2.5 of 4