Never let the truth get in the way of a good story Green Zone' Review

Posted on March 12, 2010 - 10:13am by michael The age-old suggestion never to let reality interfere with telling a good story is one of my favorites, especially when it comes to the movies. The cinema serves countless functions, but in its century-long lifespan, ultimately the most important one is still entertainment, and Green Zone certainly emphasizes the entertainment rather than reality. I should mention, however, that the story the movie tells, about what really happened behind the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction thing, isn't exactly implausible. In fact, it seems perfectly possible, almost natural. But the movie as a whole has a liberal slant that would make Oliver Stone blush, which leads to it all feeling a little like wishful thinking on the part of the Bush-haters. For my own part, I just think that all governments everywhere in the world should govern with the understanding that the whole truth, the absolute completeness of it all, will come out eventually, and Green Zone is sort of like an effort to put that truth out before all the facts are available, or even declassified. The entire movie is bookended on George W. Bush's infamous speech, where he declared - years too early, as it turned out - a successful end to the Iraq war. In fact, the movie pauses and even allows us to see half of the cast watching, and then celebrating, Bush's actual news broadcast.

"Major military operations in Iraq have ended." Bush announces. "In the battle of Iraq, the United States, and our allies...have prevailed."

Retrospectively, it's a catastrophic miscalculation, but the movie doesn't ridicule its inaccuracy so much as it utilizes the drastic error in order to drive the plot forward. Hey, I have no problem with that. This is an action movie, not a documentary, and I like to think that most of us will go into it with that understanding. You already know what the movie is about, so here's basically how it's structured. Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a soldier who notices major discrepancies between the intelligence reports handed down from above and the reality that he is seeing on the ground. When his concerns are thwarted by his superiors, he starts to believe he may have stumbled on a major conspiracy and ultimately goes rogue in his efforts to discover the truth behind it all. And that's about enough of the plot, I think. You get the idea. The important thing is that the movie so clearly sets itself up as a scathing criticism of the American intelligence infrastructure, but just when you think it's turning into a piece of liberal propaganda it turns its attention away from major targets, even from Bush himself. I still remember the backlash from conservatives when Richard Clarke wrote his book "Against All Enemies," which was severely critical of Bush (and other Presidents) about the handling of the war on terror, and the road leading up to it, but Green Zone doesn't seem to have as specific of a political agenda as you might think. It should be noted that it was directed by Paul Greengrass, a British filmmaker who is behind two of the three Bourne films, as well as United 93, the outstanding film about what may have happened aboard the hijacked United Airlines flight that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. You may remember that Greengrass went to great lengths to avoid overt political statements in that movie, and that Bush, a likely target, was studiously avoided. It was about American heroism, not governmental screwups, and I think Green Zone is the same. It's not about what went wrong, it's a hope that the truth will be revealed, or at least the correct lessons will be learned, by people on all sides. I will say it gets a little too obviously critical when it presents the "green zone," (the protected area in Iraq, away from all the fighting) almost like a Las Vegas casino. Saddam's Presidential palace has been turned into beautiful resort, complete with a gorgeous swimming pool, women sunning in bikinis (who would they be, by the way?), even a Domino's Pizza. I think we get that high ranking officials keep themselves pretty thoroughly insulated from the violence in Baghdad, I don't think we need to be smacked over the head with it. But of course, above all else, this is an action thriller. Detractors are complaining that Damon is just playing the same character that he played in the Bourne films, that the movie doesn't tell us anything new, etc, but the reality is that, believe it or not, it never really pretends to be anything more than an action film. It has powerful political implications, of course, but I don't think many people in the audience are going, "Oh my God, I can't believe that's what happened." Anyone who's paid attention to the newspapers since the war started back in 2003 will notice immediately that the pace of the movie doesn't at all follow the painfully sluggish progress of the war so much as it follows the breakneck pace of a good episode of 24. It's a movie, that's all I can say. It will make a lot of people angry, and most of those people will probably be on a certain side of the political spectrum, but I think it emphasizes the need for truth and for lessons learned much more than it points fingers, and it should definitely be commended for that. There is, after all, nothing in the movie that we haven't heard dozens of times before, but you have to admit that it's never been this entertaining! The Bean Meter