For Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), the invasion of Iraq is a search for answers, for proof, and for truth.
When a third consecutive WMD site is found empty he begins to doubt the validity of the intelligence being received from the government’s source, code-named “Magellan.”
Opposed by Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) of Pentagon Special Intelligence, but with allies including CIA Baghdad bureau chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), Miller sets out to find answers about Iraq’s weapons program, even if it takes him all the way to General Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), now the senior figure in the Iraqi government.
As another outing by Bourne franchise collaborators Damon and director Paul Greengrass, who have stated they will not continue that series, Green Zone comes off as something of an unofficial sequel – as expected – trading in the hand-to-hand combat for pitched gun battles in sandy alleyways (but make no mistake, Greengrass’s shakey-cam didn’t go anywhere).
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Green Zone Directed by Paul Greengrass |
Damon as Roy-Miller is a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Sonja playing Lord Kalidor the Conan Rip-Off: Miller plays an anti-authoritarian but unquestionably American maverick-warrior with a certain journalistic sensibility and a penchant for honesty, which is to say, Bourne-but-not-Bourne.
But if the plot sounds dangerously like an outdated Iraq war critique, it’s because that is precisely what it is: a clunkier, action-spy-thriller version of W. and Stop-Loss arriving an extra two years after the fact.
Throw in contrived and abbreviated plot arcs, a malevolent bureaucrat (in the form of Kinner’s Poundstone) to match any of 24’s cartoonishly villainous higher-ups, and a number of horrible lines and quips that could have been plagiarized from a rejected Michael Bay movie, and you have what feels like it could be Jack Bauer’s worst adventure to date (save the abominable season six).
The action is somewhat entertaining and somewhat incomprehensible (in true Bourne style) – often partly because the digital cameras used give night scenes a pixelated, salt-and-pepper quality – culminating in what feels like half an hour’s worth of shooting and chasing that will make you long for the sun-drenched havoc of Black Hawk Down or the single-take battlefield journeys in Children of Men.
With the ending – Miller’s elusive “truth” – already floating in the nebula of general knowledge and no suspense about weapons of mass destruction to propel it forward, Green Zone languishes on the screen like a supply teacher who doesn’t know any more than the class has already been taught.
John Powell (who also composed the music for the Bourne trilogy and for Stop-Loss) serves up a bombastic action score that is thoroughly rousing when it’s audible over the cacophony of gunplay and revving, careening humvees – although even then it is reminiscent of The Rock, Air Force One, Bad Boys, and other films whose octane content really did the soundtrack justice.
Piece by piece, Green Zone largely reminds one of other, better movies. It has nothing new to say about Iraq – certainly no constructive propositions in addition to those threadbare, if well deserved, criticisms about the validity of data and the potential truth about the invasion’s real provenance.
As comfort food for Bush critics (and carrying Michael Moore’s endorsement), Green Zone can scarcely disappoint. But it fails to entertain on a deeper level and its raison d'être imbues it with a certain insistent topicality which precludes the kind of archetypal storytelling that makes some films timeless and universal.
Rather, this film is rooted firmly in the Noughties, a time capsule for future generations of high-school history students to watch after Thirteen Days and World Trade Center (or Greengrass’s own United 93).
But we are standing at the end of the decade, looking forward. And to overlook Green Zone isn’t much of a loss.