Green Zone

Ok, I'm breaking with my stand-by format of two sentences, because I feel a little to shackled by the confines of it. So, without further adieu, I'll just fucking get to it.

Green Zone is a movie made by people who are pissed off about the Iraq war, for perfectly legitimate reasons. The biggest obstacle for them, to make a film about a true story, is to boil it down into something you can watch in a single sitting. So what they had to do, was make something like "Recent historical fiction". What it does, is create a single face for the dozens of people responsible for selling us a war based on faulty, if not completely fabricated evidence.

Matt Damon does an admirable job working from a complicated position. This isn't Bourne goes to Baghdad, well, at least Damon's character certainly isn't Jason Bourne. He's a no-nonsense, committed, and efficient soldier. He has to move from being a character who's job it is, to find weapons of mass destruction, and believes in the importance of his duty. The problem is, he slowly realizes, he's being sent to find something that just isn't there.

From here, the film has two big axes to grind. The aforementioned fabrication of evidence, secondly, the disbanding of the Iraqi military and police. Two represent the linchpin for both, we have an Iraqi General who factors heavily into both decisions. The disbanding of the Iraqi military is an oft forgotten, and monstrously stupid blunder that is considered one of the biggest contributing factors to the country descending into insurgency, of which, it is only just now recovering from.

So if it isn't obvious from my description or the presence of Greengrass and Damon, this movie is not a film for people who believe ""Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency, it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever.*" They clearly have an axe to grind, and when they get a little too blunt, excuse the cutlery pun, is where the film suffers.

Overall, I enjoyed the hell out of the movie. Like the previous collaborations between Damon and Greengrass, the film is action packed, and a white knuckle ride. And yes, the shaky cam persists, but not distractingly. Or I'm just desensitized to it. The cast is excellent, full of Oscar nominees and a few little gems like Jason Isaacs from Brotherhood and various bad guy roles. The biggest flaw would be that the rancor, in the writer's obvious outrage shows a little too much in some obvious dialog in the last two acts.

But overall, this movie is suffering a sad fate being overshadowed by some further masturbation of the 3D platform as explored by Tim Burton. I can't convince you fanboys not to go see that movie, but I can say, if you have some old ourtrage left over from 2003, go see Green Zone and just wish that they'd Inglorious Basterds it, and ended the movie with George W. Bush being railroaded out of office.

*Actual quote from George Walker Bush.