Climbing Higher Pictures

When most people heard that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon were gearing up to make another movie together, they assumed it was going to be the eventual fourth installment in the Bourne franchise. Imagine their surprise, when instead of the world’s most forgetful secret agent, they shifted focus to the middle east, and a story about a soldier in the early days of the Iraq invasion. With unsteady camera work and a great supporting cast in tow, does this film have what it takes to outrun the shadow of the box office kryptonite associated with Iraq war movies?

Green Zone Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: C+

It’s a complete and utter impossibility to discuss the merits or issues of the film Green Zone without addressing politics. I have plenty of my own thoughts regarding the previous administration, the war in Iraq, and the way the situation has progressed since our invasion. As the film is a work of fiction, I will begin with a series of facts. Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003, the anniversary of which is only 4 days removed from this film’s imminent release. After 7 years, I think it is safe to say that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq, something which was verified by United Nations weapons inspectors long before the invasion itself. Over the period of time from 2001 to 2003, the Bush administration released 935 false statements alleging that Iraq was a threat to the United States in a variety of different media. The United States has spent $845 billion on the war effort to date, with an estimated cost to the US economy of almost $3 trillion. None of these statements are up for debate. I’m not being anti-patriotic, I’m stating the facts. There’s a distinct difference, and it pains me that some of us are unable to see it. Those same people will probably tell you that Saddam masterminded 9/11, but there’s plenty of time to get to that later.

Our story takes place 4 weeks after the invasion. Captain Roy Miller of the US army is one of the brave men and women charged with clearing out the supposed WMD sites as briefed through their “intelligence.” They are on what amounts to a wild goose chase through a volatile and destabilized country, and are fast running out of living soldiers to continue their efforts. Each site they hit is not only empty, but isn’t even a conceivable space to house the imaginary weapons. Something must be wrong with the intelligence, or at least, made to be wrong with the intelligence after the fact. A shady source is being kept “tightly under wraps” and the CIA has little to no foothold on what is going on. Not only that, but instead of making peace with the army of Iraq, a group of generals who had very little loyalty to Saddam to begin with and using them to help stabilize the country, the United States official disband the Iraqi army and put the only hope of rapid stabilization 6 feet under.

My problem with the film is that people are going to watch it for what it is, a movie. Film, as we all know, is a medium which lends itself far more liberally to works of fiction than it does real life or documentary, and no one would assume that a political thriller starring Matt Damon is anything but fiction. At the same time, the setting and the storyline of the film are based exclusively on the kind of reality that very few Americans are still willing to believe. There were never any weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence reports were manipulated to suggest a threat that wasn’t there. These are the kinds of facts that the casual viewer will brush off as simply “Hollywood storytelling” which is exactly what they’re not. In trying to shed light on the political conspiracies at the heart of one of our nation’s greatest mistakes, the filmmakers have completely undermined any residual effect the film could have had with informing the public of the truth while maintaining the guise of entertainment. Instead we have an action film set in the Middle East with a back-story so preposterous that it’s hard to believe it’s true. That’s not going to deeply affect anybody.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Green Zone is all over the place. The story they choose to tell is one you already know the ending to. We’re still in Iraq, there’s still little to no stability in the region, so there’s no way the movie can have a satisfying ending. It also feels like a lot of buildup for a big bang that never really happens, and unlike the Bourne films which made use of some terrific third act twists to elevate their various climaxes, Green Zone falls dispiritedly flat by comparison. The shaky camera shooting style is close to nauseating here, and you feel like slapping the camera operator across the face and telling him to keep the shot steady for a change. It worked in Bourne, but its overused here, and far shakier than I’ve ever seen it before. Has Greengrass lost his touch? I doubt it. The material just wasn’t worthy of the filmmaking team at hand, and it shows in the final product. Back up a semi-truck full of money and get these guys started on a fourth Borne movie, or tell them to try something new, because whatever this is… it isn’t working.