Who would have thought, amid recent Oscar winner The Hurt Locker and films by such influential directors such as Brian De Palma and Paul Haggis, that one of the best films on the Iraq War would come from the director-actor duo who brought us two of the Bourne thrillers? Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have united once again with the recent Green Zone, a thriller set in the international zone of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, not an amnesiac like his hero in the Bourne movies, but a soldier kept out of the loop in deep state conspiracies that turned the Iraq War into a fiasco. The film begins with Miller and his men raiding locations to find weapons of mass destruction. Instead, they find bird droppings.
In a briefing, he voices his concerns that the intelligence might not be so efficient after all. He’s confronted by a U.S. Intelligence Agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), who tells him to mind his own business, maybe not in those words, but nonetheless to the same effect. After the briefing, Miller finds a kindred soul in a CIA agent, Brendan Gleeson’s Martin Brown, who has similar concerns on the intelligence.
Weapons of mass destruction: And then there were none
The other characters in Green Zone include Iraqi general Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), a figure the U.S. conspiracies unravel around, Wall Street Journal correspondent Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) and Miller’s very own informal intelligence agent, an Iraqi guy who calls himself ‘Freddie’ (Khalid Abdalla). Freddie works as a very clever device for the plot development. As things begin getting complicated, the scenes with Freddie acting as Miller’s translator and the voice of the Iraqi collective conscience clear the confusion and prepare the audience for the coming twists.
The film was inspired by the 2006 non-fiction book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland makes something brand new out of Chandrasekaran’s exposé, giving Green Zone its idealistic, hard-edged, and surprisingly down-to-earth narrative.
The characters may resemble some real people who played major and minor roles in the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its justification, which subsequently turned out to be fabricated. But in Green Zone, Greengrass and Helgeland’s concerns far from sensationalize that political sham carried out on a global scale. They want to give the audience a full ride in an action thriller spiced with real-life events and with a full-fledged hero. And in the process, they give us one of the best films on the Iraq War.
Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News on 30 April 2010
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