Green Zone Review

   Every few months or so there's always a conspiracy filled, secret undercover operation action flick and since 2002 we've seen Matt Damon as Jason Bourne in the well received Bourne films. Matt Damon returns with the director of supremacy and ultimatum to deliver what's essentially a repackaged and re-skinned Bourne film, and judging by the last film in that trilogy, it's just as gripping but now with more controversy.

   Green Zone is set in Baghdad during the Iraq War before Bush's not so well received "Mission Accomplished" "announcement", where warrant officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) and fellow marines are charged with finding the alleged weapons of mass destruction. The movie starts out with a bang, where Miller and company are in hostile territory searching an area supposedly containing WMD's. Miller expects the intel to be off as he explains this to be the third empty, outside of the terrorists, site he's inspected and so the story snowballs with the conspiracies as he digs into evidence. This idea of a soldier digging into the evidence sounds obscure, but this isn't a campy spy flick, Miller goes back and forth talking to the reporters and journalists to his superiors all while giving you a pretty damn good unpleasant sites of our own dark side. Just remember that there is no "based on a true story" label, but the ideas it brings out about false evidence for the war work well.

   So it's an anti Iraq War film about the fact we couldn't find nukes in Iraq, and does enhance the truth a bit but so much of what the eventual truth is, is very believable and as said it's a Bourne film. If you watch it, it goes through the motions. I deeply enjoyed how it played out, it's not the most action packed film ever made but it's really cool. There were some minor complaints, but they couldn't have been very avoidable. For one, I know Miller is the main character but it isn't entirely believable how he's the only one willing to understand that the three sites he hit up were frauds. In contrast the other major characters are his superior officers and journalists, who have a hard time getting the ideas through their thick skulls and they do a good job of representing the ignorance this war was full of. One other character however, Freddy, an Iraqi civilian who eventually assists as a translator, is also a great character but without spoiling anything, towards the the end he serves as an excuse to keep evidence from getting out and feels forced and exaggerated, a serious "thats all they could think of?" moment. Otherwise, if you liked the Bourne series, this is more of the same and arguably better, some will find the fiction is too hard on the war, but the fiction matches up well with the events that did actually happen.

4.5/5