Word: greengrass
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Maybe Green Zone will be the breakthrough. Set in the first months of the U.S. occupation, the film has a churning urgency and a fierce verisimilitude, courtesy of director Paul Greengrass (United 93) and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (The Hurt Locker). Shot in Spain, Morocco and the U.K., the film straps you into a Baghdad state of mind. It's hell at 130°, with dust and dread tarping the streets as if to smother anyone who'd attempt to escape. Murderous intent abounds on both the U.S. and Saddam-loyalist sides; life is cheap, and the stakes are high...
Green Zone also has Matt Damon, a real movie star, reteaming with Greengrass to essentially parachute their franchise's hero, Jason Bourne, into the toxic reality of Iraq. Like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, this new collaboration rubs the nose of a fantasy plot into the gritty soil of political intrigue. Roy Miller, the Army chief warrant officer played by Damon, is a good soldier who realizes that his mission - to unearth the weapons of mass destruction the Bush Administration used as a rationale for invading Iraq - is bogus. Now, dammit, he'll find what's behind that...
Storytellers are of course free to spin fiction from historical fact. But what Greengrass does here, unlike in his scrupulous docudrama about the seizing of United Flight 93 on 9/11, is resolve thorny foreign policy issues from 2003 with 2010 hindsight and the truth-seeking missile of an action-hero superman...
...Greengrass might say you have to twist the facts to tell the truth, and his film does get to the heart of obfuscation in the early occupation of Iraq. Besides, in movies, entertainment trumps ethics. Green Zone has a fullness of character, a density of detail, a cunning mystery plot and so much stuff blowing up that audiences might not realize they're seeing an Iraq-war film. They'll be too scared stiff enjoying themselves...
...real Damon will survive Green Zone. And those critics (like this one) who gave it a favorable review think he should be proud of a movie that provokes political discussion among viewers even as it amps up their adrenaline rush. But his and Greengrass's flop makes this potentially valuable genre even more endangered. They fought...