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.