Movie Review: Green Zone (2010)
Action packed, but irrelevant, this one is quite bewildering
Photo: Universal Pictures
Paul Greengrass's Green Zone would have best been left to videogame developers. Adapt the action that makes up nearly 80% of the film into a first person shooter and add a few cut scenes to keep hammering home the film's irrelevant political point and you've got a multi-million dollar game franchise. But no, instead we get a monotonous and unnecessary movie. Bad luck I guess.
Green Zone takes place in Baghdad in 2003 with Matt Damon starring as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller who, along with his team, has been assigned the duty of finding weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled throughout the Iraqi desert. Unfortunately, all of their missions are coming up empty and with a couple of recent casualties on fruitless missions Miller wants to know why they're coming up empty and where the bad intel is coming from. When he begins challenging the system he finds most doors slamming shut, but the CIA is willing to listen, sending him on a mission into the desert to find the truth.
The cast includes Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson and Raad Rawi. For more information on this film including pictures, trailers and a detailed synopsis choose from the following menu.
Review
"Green Zone" is a Universal Pictures release, directed by Paul Greengrass and is rated R for violence and language. The running time is 1 hour 55 minutes.
What should a country do if the reason they went to war turns out to be a lie or simply proven untrue? Do you pull out? Stay in? Act like it didn't happen? Throughout Green Zone questions such as these arise, but they are brushed under the rug as the film slows down just enough to make sure you're paying attention — THERE ARE NO WMDS! — before tirelessly moving on to the next action sequence.
In an effort to pull all of this off, the story is told much like an episode of "24" and has Damon's character going from here to there finding everything we expect him to find only to learn his efforts are fruitless. The thrill of it all is lost in redundancy. While there is an expert level of technical proficiency in the action sequences, they all mirror one another to the point one bleeds into the next and it all feels like territory we've tread only minutes earlier.
This film will draw instant comparisons to the Bourne series of films, if not because Greengrass directed Damon in the final two films in the franchise, then because that's how Universal is selling it. In all honesty, this is a Bourne film only the names and occupations have been changed. The dramatic difference between the Bourne films and this one being screenwriter Brian Helgeland doesn't seem to have been able to find much of a story in his adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," which served as the film's source material. It tries to begin exploring the consequences of dissolving the Iraqi army, but by the time it comes to that this one has already gone too far downhill. Once they went to the stock footage of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln I was pretty much fed up.
The only way Green Zone could have been interesting is if it had been released back in 2001 or 2002, and it's theories had been explored as a "what if?" scenario before the war in Iraq had ever started. Instead, it's subject matter serving as a coherent story is an afterthought and the fictional telling of the events make it even more irrelevant. Had this been a movie offering answers, or had it named actual names as opposed to making everything up, there may have been something to talk about. If Green Zone does anything it offers up the message we should learn from our mistakes, but did we really need Paul Greengrass to waste two hours of our life to tell us that?
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For once I´m delighted that a critic sees the light in this dark tunnel: how vastly overrated Greengrass is as a filmmaker. His kind of movies may make money the first weekend but they are killing what we used to call film-making. Leave the commercials to the likes of him.
Where in the review does it imply that Greengrass is overrated? And how do you come to that conclusion in the first place? "Bloody Sunday" is powerful and relevant even to audiences outside of Ireland, and United 93 is spare and unforgettable. There is, perhaps, an argument to be made against the Bourne trilogy as a whole, but you can't deny the level of filmmaking. I mean, it was so impactful on the action/thriller genre that Bond was overhauled to match its prowess.
You obviously have the right to your negative opinion, but it just seems a bit unfounded.
I read a Robert Ebert review for this yesterday giving this movie 4 stars. Then I saw it's rotten tomatos score and now this…it sounds a bit like The Knowing in that sense.
Just another adaptation of Matt Damon's hate for George Bush and Republicans. I find it interesting that his movies always contain action and guns and seem to be about the American way but in the end its just hate speech and lack of understanding of the way things work.
He would do best to go and educate himself in world affairs if he wants to continue to comment through film on politics. Better yet actually be a politician and see its not all cut and dry.
Whatever… another one of his films that I will not be watching.
Um… always? What movies with Damon except Bourne trilogy and this had lots of action and guns in it?
@Norman: While Matt Damon is studying politics, you could try actually watching some more of his films.
Norman, there were no WMD found in Iraq. Now, lighten-up and enjoy the movie which is based on facts as reported by Chief Miller. Bush Administration officials names were changed to protect the innocent; the NYT report's name and newspaper were changed to protect the innocent; but, the fact remains, THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION in Iraq and Donald Rumsfeldt, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush knew it when they went into Iraq.
I've always thought this looks like a jacked up version of Body of Lies, with 10x the action and none of the substance. It never really appealed to me, and these reviews have confirmed that.
Matt Damon is supposed to be a smart guy. Hey Matty… tell us how entire villages of Kurds were gassed when Saddam had no WMD's. Your progressive myopia only guarantees half of America won't even consider attending your films. Here's hopig the hald who will don't find another reason to skip your propaganda fests.
so your argument is that this movie is no good because everyone knows that we never found any wmd's? you must have hated titanic or any other movie based on true events.
having stated this i have not yet seen this movie and have no grtound to stand on.
it just seemed like an odd reason to dislike a movie- they cant all end with bruce willis being a ghost.
No, the argument is that it is beating the audience over the head with the fact we never found any WMDs. It comes across as an agenda movie. To compare it to Titanic the boat would have had to have been sinking over the course of the entire movie and during that time people would be running around yelling, "The boat is sinking! The boat is sinking!" and not in despair, but as if the audience watching didn't know. And that's just for starters.
hi ppl today i went to watch green zone with bunch of freinds, i was really disappointed how could any asshole make such gay movie, i think it was just a waste of my money and my life i felt like an dickhead after i watched that movie. i didnt no wht kind of movie it was, active or gayy. it has hardly any action and shooting makes it all lame and gay. but of corse thats wht i think of the movie.