Green Zone has been promoted by Universal Studios with its plot mostly obscured, wrapped around the mysterious figure "Magellan". Watching the trailer, one only gets a vague sense that the film it set in Iraq and that Matt Damon's character, Roy Miller, is searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2003. It looks, perhaps appropriately, like a close cousin to the Bourne movies, of which Paul Greengrass was also director.
It's not a bad move, since it is a lightning-quick movie in its editing and camera-work (though nowhere near as much as the adrenaline-overloaded 'Ultimatum'), but the film is more akin to Greengrass' United 93. Both films, that one about the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 that crashed in Pennsylvania, and this one about the whole reason the US went to war, take the viewer back to a point that is fresh in our collective memory- maybe too soon some would say, others not soon enough- when chaos was fully erupting, for a few hours or within grasp of a Pentagon phone call.
It's not the most light of touches Greengrass takes to the material in terms of the script. The screenplay he has to work with by Brian Hegeland takes some fictional liberties with what are factual cases: the US did take advice from an unreliable source (or rather the US listened to what they wanted to hear), they kept coming up empty-handed after already months of inspecting before the invasion, and they're still told to dig despite the futility. This is all fine, though I wonder if the film would have benefited from just a little more characterization, aside from the types and casting to them (Damon as the determined hero, Kinnear as the clean-cut but sleazy bureaucratic villain, Gleeson as the helpful CIA character, Ryan as the frustrated embedded journalist), and sometimes spelling out too clearly the points of history.
And yet it's hard to begrudge a film with so much else going on as well. What makes Green Zone powerful is Greengrass' visceral approach to the material, again more akin to United 93 than the Bourne movies. We're wrapped up in each step of the story, like a mystery infused with the purpose and drive of the hand-held camera (done by someone who knows well, Barry Akroyd of the Hurt Locker), and we want to see where it goes. There aren't too many big surprises in the story, despite its slight liberties, since it's always seemingly realistic in its scope of cinematography and technique. When Roy Miller's team does a daytime raid of a place with a suspected Sadaam general, the tension is thick and the payoff is juicy and satisfying. That there turns out to be ambiguity in Miller's situation (the line "Don't be naive" is repeated but necessary) gives some added urgency to Greengrass' direction.
If you're one of the few people on planet Earth who still are not sure whether there were WMD's in Iraq (and you're probably Dick Cheney if you're one of them), then obviously the film isn't for you. It would seems like a given now, that it was one of those blatant lies that people were told to get over as the US would be there to stay in Iraq for an indeterminable amount of time (this despite the Mission Accomplished stunt, shown here in Green Zone again punctuating the story like a sudden exclamation point). But if Green Zone does approach this material a little thick, it's still in service of the long run historically, and comes second after being an entertaining action-mystery. People years from now can look at Green Zone first as a suspense film, a war film shot rigorously and with its black-white-gray areas surely defined, and then as a history lesson. It's an imperfect but important film for our times.
It's not a bad move, since it is a lightning-quick movie in its editing and camera-work (though nowhere near as much as the adrenaline-overloaded 'Ultimatum'), but the film is more akin to Greengrass' United 93. Both films, that one about the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 that crashed in Pennsylvania, and this one about the whole reason the US went to war, take the viewer back to a point that is fresh in our collective memory- maybe too soon some would say, others not soon enough- when chaos was fully erupting, for a few hours or within grasp of a Pentagon phone call.
It's not the most light of touches Greengrass takes to the material in terms of the script. The screenplay he has to work with by Brian Hegeland takes some fictional liberties with what are factual cases: the US did take advice from an unreliable source (or rather the US listened to what they wanted to hear), they kept coming up empty-handed after already months of inspecting before the invasion, and they're still told to dig despite the futility. This is all fine, though I wonder if the film would have benefited from just a little more characterization, aside from the types and casting to them (Damon as the determined hero, Kinnear as the clean-cut but sleazy bureaucratic villain, Gleeson as the helpful CIA character, Ryan as the frustrated embedded journalist), and sometimes spelling out too clearly the points of history.
And yet it's hard to begrudge a film with so much else going on as well. What makes Green Zone powerful is Greengrass' visceral approach to the material, again more akin to United 93 than the Bourne movies. We're wrapped up in each step of the story, like a mystery infused with the purpose and drive of the hand-held camera (done by someone who knows well, Barry Akroyd of the Hurt Locker), and we want to see where it goes. There aren't too many big surprises in the story, despite its slight liberties, since it's always seemingly realistic in its scope of cinematography and technique. When Roy Miller's team does a daytime raid of a place with a suspected Sadaam general, the tension is thick and the payoff is juicy and satisfying. That there turns out to be ambiguity in Miller's situation (the line "Don't be naive" is repeated but necessary) gives some added urgency to Greengrass' direction.
If you're one of the few people on planet Earth who still are not sure whether there were WMD's in Iraq (and you're probably Dick Cheney if you're one of them), then obviously the film isn't for you. It would seems like a given now, that it was one of those blatant lies that people were told to get over as the US would be there to stay in Iraq for an indeterminable amount of time (this despite the Mission Accomplished stunt, shown here in Green Zone again punctuating the story like a sudden exclamation point). But if Green Zone does approach this material a little thick, it's still in service of the long run historically, and comes second after being an entertaining action-mystery. People years from now can look at Green Zone first as a suspense film, a war film shot rigorously and with its black-white-gray areas surely defined, and then as a history lesson. It's an imperfect but important film for our times.