Green Zone is a serious political action movie. This is a very good thing. It has some flaws, both in concept and execution, but the material is powerful enough to carry the film over these.
The plot concerns Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who is supposed to be searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, after again and again finding nothing, he starts going against his orders in pursuit of the truth. Roy Miller is an everyman that the audience should identify with as he discovers the catastrophic lies and manipulations of his government.
And therein lies one of the film’s basic problems. Matt Damon is very engaging and makes his character very likeable; but there’s a serious logic issue here, which has political implications. We are supposed to be believe that the everyman – representing us – actually believes that there are WMDs in Iraq, as if this was what most people thought. And yet it was utterly, utterly clear even before the war began that there were no WMDs, that there could be no WMDs. Paul Greengrass, the director, says about the movie:
“The problem, I think, for me is that something about that event strained all the bonds and sinews that connect us all together. For me it’s to do with the fact that they said they had the intelligence, and then it emerged later that they did not.”
But it didn’t emerge later - everyone already knew it was bullshit when they said it, and then all the intelligence was disproven in detail long before there even was a war. In interviews, both Greengrass and Damon seem rather unwilling to support their film’s political aspects, and try to present it more like an “apolitical” film like The Hurt Locker. But you can’t possibly claim that it doesn’t matter whether you’re for or against the war – not if you believe even a fraction of what the movie shows.
I can see why they would take this approach in terms of the character, of course. (I can’t see why they are so terrified of Fox News and other conservative critics. I mean, fascists are scary, but if you make a film like this you should know to stand up against these people.) Starting out with a hero who knows nothing means you can show the process of deconstructing the lies, so it’s not all bad.
One of the most impressive and well-done aspects of the film is how it constantly shows us just how out of touch the people running the war are from the reality in Iraq. Their decisions lead to disaster after disaster, and their inhuman methods make everything even worse. The internal politics of Iraq are as complicated as those of any other country, and the decisions of the American government take none of that complexity into account.
Some people think this film says (as an experienced CIA agent in the movie argues, against the government’s actual policy) that keeping the Iraqi Army in power would have prevented the insurgency. This kind of thinking is popular in Democratic circles – “if we’d listened to better intelligence, we could’ve won this war!” But that’s not what this movie shows at all. I won’t spoil the ending, but what is excellently shown is that there was no correct way of handling the invasion, because it was an invasion. The American army (and its allies) has no right to be there, and the American government and its allies cannot make decisions for Iraq. There is no solution because the problem is that a foreign army is there in the first place.
The film does have a very odd last couple of scenes, which I’m not sure how to read. I think they are supposed to give us some kind of feeling of triumpth, but all they do for me is remind me that it’s 2010 and Iraq is still occupied, and people are still being tortured and killed for nothing.
A few words about other aspects of the movie. Visually, it’s typical Paul Greengrass – all handheld and shaky and fast. But here it works, and gives the film a powerful immediacy. There’s an action scene at the end which goes on just a little too long and is a little too confusing, but then, in real life battles are also confusing.
The actors are all excellent, and it’s wonderful to see Greg Kinnear in such an unpleasant part. The characters are well-written and well-performed. None of us recognized Jason Isaacs. Khalid Abdalla as “Freddy” is the heart of the movie and delivers its most important line.
The only problematic character is the reporter Lawrie Dayne, played by Amy Ryan. Here we are asked to believe that the media didn’t know the information they were spreading was false, which is completely absurd, and undermines that character – which is a shame, because there were good storytelling possibilities here.
Green Zone has its faults, but it works both as a political movie and as an action movie, and it’s worth seeing. Just remember that the Iraq war didn’t end when President Bush left office.
(A recommendation: the best Paul Greengrass film is without question Bloody Sunday. See it.)
Interesting links:
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Actually, when the war first started, everybody (here in the US, anyways) believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and those few who didn’t would not dare speak up. Of course, it could be a case where everybody thought it was bullshit, but they didn’t want to speak up because they thought everybody else believed it was true and were afraid of getting ostracized, but whatever.
I guess my point is, we were duped into this war by exploitation of 9/11 by the Bush administration. He bet that our fear after that tragedy would make us believe anything, and he won.
Also, I doubt that news reporters knew that their reports were false, because they can barely dress themselves in the morning.
Maybe that’s true of your community, but I don’t think it’s true of the whole US. There were people who spoke up, there were protests. Even on TV there were plenty of dissidents. Just not enough.
As for reporters, they definitely knew. There was enough public evidence that proved the WMD stories were wrong, and they did their best to talk around it.