Review: 'Green Zone' hits a strong note

Green Zone
Cast: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs, Khalid Abdalla
Director: Paul Greengrass
Rating: * * * ½

Yet another War Drama set in Iraq during the US-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, this one has Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller(Matt Damon) and his team of Army inspectors being dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert.

But instead of finding the feared WMD’s, they stumble upon an elaborate cover-up that inverts the very purpose of their mission. Though Brian Hegelhand’s script  is a fictionalized account which derives it’s main power from Rajiv Chandrasekharan’s ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald city’, it never hits a false note.

Miller, the dutiful, serious, highly moral and ethically concerned officer, is in a way critiquing the carefully camouflaged focus of films like the Hurt Locker in which political questions are left unanswered. There is plenty of action to be had, foot chases and gun battles are ably executed and aided by staggering handheld camerawork and staccato editing.

For this film Barry Ackroyd had to doctor locations in Morocco and Spain in order for them to resemble the ravaged Baghdad seen in documentaries and news feeds.

Greengrass and Hegeland make smart use of historical record to recreate a heinous picture of war politics albeit with a lot of padding. The fiction is involving but never false. It’s a streamlined version of an infinitely complex event . As such, it’s sentiments appear strongly anti-American and braver than that expressed by Bigelow’s Oscar winner.