Green Zone (***½)
Directed by: Paul Greengrass Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Yigal Naor, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdallah
Seen: May 28th 2010
***½ Out of ****
Green Zone is part of an elite group of films; those ones that will keep most any viewer right at the edge of their seat while balancing delicate political matters with sublime action. Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass form a great alliance, as the last two Bourne movies have already shown. In Green Zone however, Damon has no memory loss – it is in fact the good judgment of his character that fires up events in Green Zone.
Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) and his squad specialise in hunting weapons of mass destruction, but after the nth raid on an empty warehouse he starts becoming distrustful of the sources for intelligence, and he raises this issue at a debriefing. He is barged out of the way with claims that the intelligence is good, but CIA officer Martin Brown approaches him afterwards, telling him the next raid will also be on an empty facility, as it has already been searched two months prior. The viewer is given a first introduction to the main antagonist of the movie, politician Clark Poundstone (Kinnear) – the owner/handler of Magellan, the alleged source of all the WMD intelligence – as he greets an Iraqi politician at Saddam International Airport while doing his best to evade reporter Lawrie Dayne (Ryan).
As Miller’s team prepare to take the next facility, they are approached by Iraqi taxi driver Freddie (Abdallah), who informs them of another interesting development; there are high ranking Iraqi officials in a nearby house. They investigate and find Freddie’s claims true, General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Naor), a wanted man (the Jack of Clubs in the terrorist deck of cards), is present – and the team attempts an arrest but only capture an Al-Rawi henchman. This is when Major Briggs (Isaacs) appears on the scene, a Delta Force operator who works for Poundstone. Briggs takes Miller’s prisoner by force, and they leave, setting the scene for a good story and some great intrigue.
Green Zone can be many things, depending on what you want – a good action movie, an intriguing political thriller, even a suspenseful investigative story – as the so-called good guys battle each other for either the revelation or the suppression of truth. Comment on America’s involvement in other countries’ affairs is not expressly made, but the way events turn out makes it clear that the best of intentions can look like nothing other than grand misunderstanding (through bloated self importance) and ignorant manipulation. One character is warned of his plans being ignorant, which he promptly ignores while belligerently continuing down his own war path.
Green Zone is a fantastic wartime movie, as it offers a great range, from political game-playing to shaky-cam in your face war sequences. What is most entertaining and alarming about it is that it is partly based on true events as relayed in journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and that it shows both the far reaching effects and the futility of acting in what you believe to be the best interest of an idealism. Green Zone is a magnificent thriller.
Comments