Review

Review Date: 14-March-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Green Zone (2010)

Every now and then I encounter people who think that when they read something on this website that does not jibe with their own opinion it is somehow a failure on my part. Their cinematic passion (or perhaps their insecurity) prevents them from seeing that if a critic's job were to agree with every other moviegoer on the planet, the whole pursuit would be a wee bit impossible. Had I the energy to argue with this attitude, I would try to explain that movie reviews, like most forms of writing, are meant to entertain, in addition to promoting thought or conversation and conveying useful information.

Do similar goals adhere to movies themselves? Should a motion picture designed to enlighten and inflame the populace also be expected to entertain? That is the question to which I keep returning with Green Zone because director Paul Greengrass seems stuck on it as well. His journalistic impulses bump up against his desires to make an action flick and a war drama, with vertigo-inducing results.

In fact, Green Zone made me sick. The hand-held camera movement almost caused me to lose my cookies while the story gave me the psychological collywobbles. A bit of fictionalized history, it follows a U.S. soldier (Matt Damon) sent to Iraq to locate weapons of mass destruction in 2003. After his initial raids yield nothing more than old toilets, despite supposedly solid intelligence coming out of the American war machine, he begins probing the motives and guidance behind the search for WMDs. This leads him into an alliance with a CIA veteran (Brendan Gleeson) and opposition to the Bush administration's overseer (Greg Kinnear). As he learns what we all know now — that Iraq harbored no such weapons — he receives lessons from natives of the land he has invaded, including an average guy trying to make sense of his country's chaos (Khalid Abdalla) and one of Saddam Hussein's top generals (Igar Naor).

The plot consists of running and shooting punctuated by conversations where Damon looks serious as a good man being forced to swallow a terrible truth. It feels at once too jumbled and too simplistic. Regardless of who is chased on screen, the target is clearly the United States' gross distortion of Iraq's threat and transition to democracy. This invites comparison with another recent film, The Ghost Writer, which disparaged Washington's manipulation of the British government and their joint abuse of suspected terrorists. Such a comparison helps answer my opening question. The Ghost Writer wrapped its didacticism in an entertaining package with distinctive characters and suspense. It helps set a standard which Green Zone, an onrush of offended, noisy argument, fails to meet.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.