NO MORE TAKING ORDERS
Green Zone
***1/2
Review by Paul Preston
What a shame that no one saw this movie! Universal did everything they could to get your ass in a theater seat, and you still didn’t do it, did you? From the star of “The Bourne Supremacy”! From the director of “The Bourne Ultimatum”! You saw both of those movies, didn’t you? So, why didn’t you see “Green Zone”? You missed one of the best movies of the year.
Director Paul Greengrass (“United 93”, “Bloody Sunday”) is one of those rare commodities in Hollywood. He’s never made a bad movie. Same can only be said of a few filmmakers – Pixar, Alexander Payne, Jason Reitman, for example. “Green Zone” continues Greengrass’ streak of making smart, dynamic action films that engage the brain and your adrenaline.
Perhaps “Green Zone” didn’t hit with audiences because it’s part of the great denial Americans have towards what’s actually happening in Iraq. “The Hurt Locker” had awards HEAPED on it, but it still wrapped up awards season as the least-seen Oscar winner in years. People just don’t want to know what’s happening over there in the war. And there’s certainly plenty of distracting entertainment out there for people like that. But “Green Zone” has wisely wrapped an informative story about the search for WMD in kinetic, hi-tech entertainment.
Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a Chief Warrant Officer in Baghdad in charge of finding the stashes of weapons of mass destruction. So, right away I know that this isn’t going to be a feel-good movie. The filmmakers have established at the beginning that our hero will not accomplish his mission! There are no WMD. This part of the film made me angry. It’s frustrating as hell to see a depiction of our soldiers on a fruitless mission. The one thing that I’m told you can’t mess with is intel, and the belief that Iraq was harboring WMD is the result of people screwing with intel to suit their own war-mongering means.
We’ve seen this played out in movies like “W” or “Wag the Dog” (in which a war was created to cover up a sex scandal, as opposed to the more nefarious reasons of personal revenge and making money, which is more true to our current real-life situation in the middle east). What I haven’t seen is the direct effect on our soldiers, which “Green Zone” portrays. They’re lost, following pointless orders, dying on missions which serve little purpose and being mishandled and misdirected in many ways (and my personal view would add that we never needed an army to fight terrorists, we needed special ops. We’re not fighting an army. We need five Navy Seals to slip into a camp, take out the folks who plotted 9/11, then disappear into the fog, Jesse Ventura-style. But as “Green Zone” and THE NEWS have taught us, U.S. troops weren’t invading Iraq to fight terrorists, we were on a flawed mission of nation-building where we didn’t belong).
Miller goes rogue after learning that his mission is doomed, determined to expose the real reason Americans invaded Iraq. A tall order. Helping him is journalist Lawrie Dayne, played by the great Amy Ryan. Based on the lightweight, no-questions-asked coverage of the war by the media, journalists are a dying species of people to put your faith in. Helping more is the even greater Brendan Gleeson as Marty, a CIA operative who leaks the true nature of America’s presence in Iraq to Miller and gets the ball rolling. The eternally underappreciated Greg Kinnear is also great as White House stooge Clark Poundsgate. Gleeson squaring off with Kinnear is great to watch.
For reasons unkown, Greengrass is the only filmmaker in my book who gets a pass with the ‘shaky-cam’ action style. He does it ad nauseum, but I don’t seem to mind. I have a theory on why that might be. Perhaps the frantic pace of the filmmaking is in service of something greater than “I got nothin’, so let’s shake the shot around so people think we’ve got something”. Watch the god-awful “Another 48 Hrs.” or the popular, but shaky-for-no-reason “The Rock”, and you’ll see the camera goin’ crazy in scenes where it shouldn’t. This is overcompensation. When Greengrass does it, it’s part of a bigger picture that’s ramping up intensity or disorientation, and it gets a pass.
No surprise, Damon’s very good in this part. There may not be a more sure thing of a lead actor going today. And tech elements are fantastic, especially the you-are-there feel of the sets, putting the viewer in a country torn up by one needless war after another.
Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Release Date: March 12, 2010
Run Time: 115 Minutes
Country: France/Spain/USA/UK
Rated: R
Distributor: Universal Pictures
