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Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass return to the propulsive action and visceral editing of the Bourne films -- but a cliched script and stock characters keep those methods from being as effective this time around.
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A Bourne-style action thriller doubles as an indictment of war
Matt Damon in "Green Zone."
"Green Zone" looks at an American war in a way almost no Hollywood movie ever has: We're not the heroes, but the dupes. Its message is that Iraq's fabled "weapons of mass destruction" did not exist, and that neocons within the administration fabricated them, lied about them and were ready to kill to cover up their deception.
Is this true? I'm not here to say. It's certainly one more element in the new narrative that has gradually emerged about Iraq, the dawning realization that we went to war under false premises. "Green Zone," directed by Paul Greengrass , is a thriller that makes no claim to be based on fact, but provides characters and situations that have uncanny real-life parallels. Its director made two of the "Bourne" films, and imports his approach to Baghdad, starring Matt Damon as an unstoppable action hero.
But this isn't merely a thriller. It has a point to argue: Critical blunders at the outset made a quick and easy victory impossible, and turned Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo-op into a historic miscalculation. "Green Zone" argues, as many observers have, that the fatal error of the United States was to fire the officers and men of the Iraqi army and leave them at large with their weapons. The Iraqi army had no great love of Saddam and might have been a helpful, stabilizing force. Instead, it was left unemployed, armed and alienated.
Damon, playing Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, is seen at the outset leading a raid on a suspected storage site for WMDs. Nothing there. Another raid, intended to find weapons of chemical warfare, turns up years-old pigeon droppings. Because some of the raids produce casualties, he begins to question the intelligence reports the raids are based on. He speaks out at a briefing, and rather improbably finds himself face to face with a U.S. intelligence agent named Poundstone ( Greg Kinnear ). He's fed the usual line and told to perform his duty, but is overheard by Martin Brown, a hulking, grizzled CIA man who's an old Middle East hand. Soon he's meeting with Brown to pass on his doubts.
"Green Zone" indicates that the CIA, which lacked (as in real life) any evidence to back up the WMD claims, was cut out of the loop, and that Poundstone is not only the architect of the neocon fictions, but their enforcer; he even has a military group answering directly to him.
Miller also meets a New York newspaperwoman named Lawrie Dayne ( Amy Ryan ), whose reports about a secret Iraqi informer have given credence to the WMD claims. From her, he discovers that Gen. Al Rawi ( Yigal Naor ) of the Iraqi army met with Poundstone in Jordan but, unlike the source Poundstone cited, flatly told him Saddam had no WMDs. So the bad intel was cooked up to justify the war the neocons desired.
Have I made the plot sound complex? Greengrass works with screenwriter Brian Helgeland to tell it with considerable clarity. By limiting the characters and using typecasting, he makes a web of deceit easy to understand. Also a great help to Miller is a local named Freddy ( Khalid Abdalla ), who risks his life to help him, acts as a translator and is given the film's key line of dialogue.
The action in "Green Zone" is followed by Greengrass in the QueasyCam style I've found distracting in the past: lots of quick cuts between hand-held shots. It didn't bother me here. That may be because I became so involved in the story. Perhaps also because unlike the "Bourne" films, this one contains no action sequences that are logically impossible. When we see a car chase that couldn't take place in the real world, we naturally think about the visual effects. When they could take place and it's a good movie, we're thinking about the story.
"Green Zone" will no doubt be under fire from those who are still defending the fabricated intelligence we used as an excuse to invade Iraq. Yes, the film is fiction, employs farfetched coincidences and improbably places one man at the center of all the action. It is a thriller, not a documentary. It's my belief that the nature of the neocon evildoing has by now become pretty clear. Others will disagree. The bottom line is: This is one hell of a thriller.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
- Greg Kinnear as Clark Poundstone
- Matt Damon as Roy Miller
- Brendan Gleeson as Martin Brown
- Khalid Abdalla as Freddy
- Amy Ryan as Lawrie Dayne
- Yigal Naor as Gen. Al Rawi
- Jason Isaacs as Briggs
- Brian Helgeland
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- Paul Greengrass
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Is Green Zone Based on a True Story?
‘Green Zone’ is an action-thriller film directed by Paul Greengrass and stars Matt Damon , Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, and Jason Isaacs in the lead roles. It revolves around a US Army Chief Warrant Officer’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It has received a mixed response from critics, with praise directed toward’s its action sequences. But the cliched writing and weak characters were generally panned. The movie features many references and parallels to real-world events and the political climate, but is the movie inspired by a true story? We did a little investigation into the matter, and here’s what we learned.
‘Green Zone’ is partially based on a true story. It is a fictionalized version of the non-fiction novel ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone’ written by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that thoroughly examines the overall handling of the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the growing civil insurgency in the country post-America’s invasion of Iraq . One of the major reasons for America’s invasion was Iraq’s alleged development and/or possession of weapons of mass destruction under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, and this facet of real life is essential to the movie’s plot.
The title itself alludes to the Green Zone, also known as the International Zone of Baghdad, which was formed after America invaded Iraq in 2003. After the invasion, the Coalition Provisional Authority, a provisional government, was established for the transition of power to the Iraqis. The Green Zone was the governmental center of the Coalition Provisional Authority and has since remained the center for subsequent government (and international) authorities in Iraq.
Matt Damon’s character, Roy Miller, is loosely based on the real-life Chief Warrant Officer Richard “Monty” Gonzales, who also served as a consultant on the film. Similar to Miller in the film, Gonzales was also tasked with hunting down weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion. Yigal Naor plays General Mohammed Al Rawi, a character inspired by the real-life Iraqi informant Rafid Ahmed Alwan aka “Curveball.” The character of Martin Brown is said to be based on Jay Garner, who was briefly the Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.
Most of the plot revolves around Miller’s search for WMDs. His search is affected by the real-life socio-political climate in Iraq at the time, chiefly the actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The film also depicts the dissolution of the Iraqi military and similar entities operational in Saddam Hussein’s regime. The decision to dissolve the army was taken under the Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, signed on May 23, 2003, which has since become a highly controversial and contentious matter in world politics.
In the movie’s climax, Al Rawi is killed by Freddy. However, in real life, Alwan is still alive. Most of the US military’s investigation of Iraqi WMDs was based on Alwan’s claims. But he turned out to be a somewhat unreliable source of information as Alwan’s allegations were largely proved false in 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group’s final report. In the film, Al Rawi’s death is a huge turning point in Miller’s search, and his death creates a pseudo-confirmation of his credibility.
Speaking to The Guardian , director Paul Greengrass stated that he wished to make a film about the then-current real-world political situation, which was being driven by the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Greengrass did extensive research on the subject before crafting a story but chose to fictionalize his research to make the film accessible to the audience of the ‘ Bourne ‘ franchise while also expressing his opinion on the Iraq War through the movie. He said, “Most of all – this is the core of it really – it was a film made out of my sense of affront and anger. I wanted to say, “I know what you did.” And that statement has immeasurably more power if it’s made to a broad audience in the vernacular of popular genre cinema.”
The film’s principal adviser, Richard Gonzales, stated in an opinion piece published by Fox News that he only agreed to participate after Greengrass assured him that the film would not delve deep into the contentious aspects of the subject. He also revealed that his job was to assist in establishing the plot further away from reality: “Paul asked me to distinguish which elements of the film were factual and which were pure fantasy.”
“As I watched the plot develop into a larger-than-life, unrealistic conspiracy theory, I felt there could be no mistaking it for anything other than a great Hollywood action thriller,” read Gonzales’ statement. So, from the words of Greengrass and Gonzales, we can infer that ‘Green Zone,’ though inspired by real events of great significance to world politics, is a fictional story in the vein of the director’s signature action-thrillers that intend to make a well educated political statement in their own way.
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Movie Review | 'Green Zone'
A Search for That Casualty, Truth
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By A.O. Scott
- March 11, 2010
“We’re here to do a job,” says an American soldier in Baghdad, about a month after the United States-led invasion of Iraq and a third of the way into “Green Zone,” Paul Greengrass’s breakneck tour of street-level mayhem and official deceit. “The reasons don’t matter.”
“They matter to me,” says Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, played with steely efficiency by Matt Damon. Later, when his search for phantom weapons of mass destruction has led him to uncover a web of lies, spin and ideological wish-fulfillment, Miller expands on the point. “The reasons we go to war always matter,” he says, throwing in an expletive to make sure his meaning is clear. “They always matter.”
Miller’s words put him at odds with some of his comrades and with a military culture that discourages service members from questioning whatever mission they are charged with carrying out. But this dutiful, serious officer is also offering a pointed, if implicit, critique of a lot of other recent war movies that have carefully pushed political questions to one side in their intensive focus on the perils and pressures of combat.
There is plenty of fighting in “Green Zone,” most of it executed with the hurtling hand-held camerawork and staccato editing that are hallmarks of Mr. Greengrass’s style. From “Bloody Sunday” through the second and third “Bourne” movies (which turned Mr. Damon into a minimalist movie star), this director has honed his skill at balancing chaos with clarity. Using locations in Morocco and Spain uncannily doctored to resemble the Baghdad we know from documentaries and contemporary television news feeds, Mr. Greengrass (decisively aided by the stroboscopic vision of his cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, who also shot “The Hurt Locker”) choreographs foot chases and gun battles that unfold with the velocity, complexity and precision of a Bach fugue played on overdrive.
But like all of the best action filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow, justly rewarded at this week’s Academy Awards for her stringent, soulful work on “The Hurt Locker” Mr. Greengrass has never been interested in technique for its own sake. Action under pressure is, for him, a test and a revelation of character. “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” refined this axiom to its philosophical essence. Mr. Damon’s character in those movies never knew who he was until he saw what he did.
Miller, of course, is an ordinary fighter rather than an amnesiac superassassin, but his predicament is not so different from Jason Bourne’s. His motives become apparent to him only at the moment of decision, and the more confusing the circumstances, the more quickly he must react.
The crisis Miller faces is more ethical than existential. At first his assignment is straightforward, if also potentially hazardous: to help secure and take control of sites where Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction are believed to be hidden. But as the members of Miller’s team repeatedly come up empty risking their lives to raid vacant warehouses and abandoned factories he finds himself uncovering a hidden history of manipulation and double-dealing. His simple questions concerning problems with the intelligence reports about the weapons lead him down a hall of mirrors, into conflicts far more tangled than the simple, black-and-white battle between democracy and tyranny.
To anyone who was paying attention in 2003 and after, this is familiar territory. Mr. Greengrass and the screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, deftly glean material from the historical record, and while they compress, simplify and invent according to the imperatives of the genre this is a thriller, not a documentary they do so with seriousness and an impressive sense of scruples. They have clearly studied journalistic accounts of the early days of the war, citing Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s vivid “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” as a particular inspiration, and while the picture they paint of infighting among the Americans and growing factionalism among the Iraqis may not be literally accurate in every particular, it has the rough authority of novelistic truth.
Miller’s questions about unreliable intelligence are brushed off by the higher-ups, in particular a Pentagon intelligence officer named Poundstone, played with perfect officiousness by Greg Kinnear. (It’s funny to think that the last time he and Mr. Damon met on screen, it was as quarrelsome conjoined twins in Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s “Stuck on You.”) Poundstone, with a direct line to the Bush White House and a mastery of its idioms “democracy is messy,” he declares, paraphrasing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is the film’s stand-in for a number of real-life figures, most of them not named because they don’t need to be.
As such, Poundstone is both a canny opportunist and a true believer, dispensing idealistic bromides even as he wields a mean Machiavellian stiletto. His nemesis is Martin Brown, a shambling C.I.A. man played by Brendan Gleeson, whose knowledge of the region leads him to predict sectarian bloodshed and political paralysis. Miller is sucked into the power struggle between these two officials and the agencies they represent, and he also makes contact with a journalist named Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), who has been publishing misinformation about the weapons that comes, via Poundstone, from a shadowy Iraqi source. (Though she works for The Wall Street Journal, Dayne is likely to remind viewers of Judith Miller, the former reporter for The New York Times who was criticized after the invasion for reporting that helped to bolster the Bush administration’s case.)
Among the Americans in Baghdad, there is back-stabbing and miscommunication people on the same side working at cross purposes and sometimes in direct conflict. Miller experiences this in a series of encounters with a Special Forces hotshot played by Jason Isaacs, who has a habit of showing up to undermine whatever Miller is doing, sometimes punching him in the face for good measure.
For the Iraqis things are much worse, and “Green Zone” is admirable in its refusal to make them bit players in their own nation’s drama even though the Americans occupy center stage. A Baathist general named Al Rawi (Igal Naor) lurks in the shadows, either a potential asset in the American effort to reconstruct the country or a dangerous obstacle. At Miller’s side is a man he calls Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), who serves as an informant and a translator and who expresses the deep ambivalence the hope, the disappointment, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who suffered under Hussein’s dictatorship and are not sure how much to trust their liberators.
“It is not you who will decide what happens here,” Freddy says to Miller, in one of the film’s forgivably pointed lines. I say forgivably because “Green Zone” seems to epitomize the ability of mainstream commercial cinema to streamline the complexities of the real world without becoming overly simplistic, to fictionalize without falsifying.
Pedants may object that the chase sequences and plot twists distort the facts, while thrill-seekers may complain that the politics get in the way of the explosions and firefights. And the inevitable huffing and puffing about this movie’s supposedly left-wing or “anti-American” agenda has already begun.
All of this suggests that the arguments embedded within the movie’s version of 2003 are still going on seven years later, and are still in need of accessible and honest airing. Which is precisely what “Green Zone,” without forsaking its job of entertainment, attempts. When Mr. Greengrass made “United 93,” his 2006 reconstruction of one of the Sept. 11 hijackings, some people fretted that it was too soon. My own response to “Green Zone” is almost exactly the opposite: it’s about time.
“Green Zone” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Violent action and language to match.
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Paul Greengrass; written by Brian Helgeland, inspired by the book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; director of photography, Barry Ackroyd; edited by Christopher Rouse; music by John Powell; production designer, Dominic Watkins; costumes by Sammy Sheldon; visual effects by Peter Chang; produced by Mr. Greengrass, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Lloyd Levin; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
WITH: Matt Damon (Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller), Greg Kinnear (Clark Poundstone), Brendan Gleeson (Martin Brown), Amy Ryan (Lawrie Dayne), Khalid Abdalla (Freddy), Igal Naor (Al Rawi) and Jason Isaacs (Lieutenant Briggs).
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Green zone — film review.
In "Green Zone," director Paul Greengrass brings the frenetic, run-and-gun style with which he utterly transformed the movie thriller in the Jason Bourne series to a different kind of thriller, one with a sharper political edge.
By Kirk Honeycutt , The Associated Press October 14, 2010 8:57pm
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In “Green Zone,” director Paul Greengrass brings the frenetic, run-and-gun style with which he utterly transformed the movie thriller in the Jason Bourne series to a different kind of thriller, one with a sharper political edge. For “Green Zone” explores the Bush administration’s willingness to embrace palpable lies over murky truths in order to sell the Iraq War to the American public.
Iraq mostly has been a nonstarter at the boxoffice, but this is Matt Damon, Greengrass and the “Bourne” team reunited on another breathless venture into ticking-clock urgency. So Universal should easily overcome that hurdle to rack up considerable theatrical coin in North America and overseas.
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Drawing on his years as a British television journalist covering global conflicts for ITV, Greengrass brings a cinema verite style to his thrillers. He makes these movies look as if a guerrilla camera crew has somehow tagged along with a movie’s protagonist to catch key moments in an unfolding story as it explodes in the character’s face.
In Hitchcock terms, the movie has both a goal and a MacGuffin. The goal is the determination by U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) to discover the reason why his team of inspectors comes up empty every time commanders send them to find chemical weapons in the Iraqi desert. The MacGuffin is a small notebook an Iraqi general grabbed four months earlier as the U.S. invasion began. It contains the addresses of Baathist safe houses in the Baghdad area.
Endangering the lives of his soldiers to hit a target, which Pentagon “intel” has fingered as a storage site for WMDs, and again finding nothing, Miller wants answers. Returning to Baghdad, he encounters three people who could supply them: Defense Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), CIA station chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). Miller doesn’t like what he hears.
All the intelligence comes from a single source. This source has confirmed Dayne’s many stories about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of MWDs and now pinpoints the sites Miller’s team fruitlessly searches. Then Miller runs across an individual who does have accurate information.
A local, English-speaking Iraqi who calls himself Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) risks his life to approach Miller to tell him that key Iraqi army figures, all wanted by coalition forces, are meeting in a house nearby. This proves to be true. But in a firefight, the Iraqi general escapes, leaving behind that notebook.
This is briefly in Miller’s possession, but then a strange thing happens: A Special Forces unit under Lt. Col. Briggs (Jason Isaacs) abruptly moves in to snatch Miller’s prisoners. Miller is forced to slip the notebook to Freddy.
Aren’t we all on the same side, Miller wonders? CIA agent Brown cautions him against being naive. It now dawns on Miller that he has stumbled onto a cover-up. The race is on to find the general, who seemingly is the all-knowing source for much of the government’s intelligence — and the reporter’s stories. Not everyone wants the general taken alive.
Damon, in motion the entire movie, acts as a magnet, drawing every detail of the story and its character into his orbit. Although there might be a touch of naivete to his character’s determination to ferret out the truth, there is a Jimmy Stewart aspect, too. He positively will not let anyone, no matter where he belongs in the chain of command or how far “off the reservation” his character drifts, stand in the way of the truth.
The Brown vs. Poundstone dynamics — the “dinosaur” CIA veteran and the intelligence agent bringing Neo-Con ideology to the Middle East with little thought for the actual needs of a postwar nation — represent a dramatic standoff. The journalist, with the ghost of the New York Times’ Judith Miller lurking in the background, supplies one key piece of information in the troubling mosaic the protagonist puts together.
Abdalla, operating with a prosthetic leg and a battered old Toyota, represents the modern Arab, who watches in dismay as overconfident Americans try to snatch his rebellion and country away from him.
The movie takes its inspiration from a nonfiction book by former Washington Post Baghdad chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” It’s not, strictly speaking, an adaptation because Brian Helgeland’s script is fiction. Rather, the book supplies something of a beacon for the filmmakers, guiding them in their interpretation of the folly of ignorance and ambition emanating from inside the Green Zone, a safety area including the old Republican Palace where American decision-makers remain cut off from the Iraqi reality.
Greengrass and his “Bourne” team — cinematographer Barry Ackroyd worked with him on “United 93” — do a magnificent job of turning locations in Spain, Morocco and the U.K. into a realistic Iraq, a region tumbled into chaos and devastating destruction to its infrastructure.
That chaos tips over into the action of the movie as the film hurtles from one destination to another in a race against time. John Powell’s propulsive music eggs the action ever forward, and Christopher Rouse’s rapid-fire editing nervously stitches the stunts, chases, fights and confrontations together. It’s a remarkable film.
Opens: Friday, March 12 (Universal)
Production: Working Title in association with Studio Canal and Relativity Media Cast: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, Jason Isaacs Director: Paul Greengrass Screenwriter: Brian Helgeland Inspired by the book by: Rajiv Chandrasekaran Producers: Paul Greengrass, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lloyd Levin Executive producers: Debra Hayward, Liza Chasin Director of photography: Barry Ackroyd Production designer: Dominic Watkins Music: John Powell Costume designer: Sammy Sheldon Editor: Christopher Rouse Rated R, 114 minutes
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The 'Green Zone,' Where Good Intel Is Hard To Find
Ella Taylor
Chasing Ghosts: Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a disillusioned Army warrant officer charged with tracking down weapons of mass destruction in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Universal hide caption
- Director: Paul Greengrass
- Genre: Action
- Running Time: 115 min
'Does It Make Sense To You?'
Media no longer available
'Firefight'
Like the hugely enjoyable if morally vacuous political satire In the Loop, the new alpha-thriller Green Zone takes as its premise that search for elusive weapons of mass destruction that triggered the second Iraq war. Between the screw-ups, cover-ups and other misfires that shaped this sorry example of the Anglo-American special relationship, farce would seem to be the right way to go.
Yet though Green Zone also has a British director, Paul Greengrass, the movie opts instead for an uneasy blend of American paranoia and old-school warrior heroism. Which of these movies you'll take to your heart will depend in part on whether you view the WMD debacle as a black comedy fueled by rank careerism mixed with bumbling incompetence, or a conspiracy concocted by top-level American nasties — and thwarted by a throwback hero applying his barrel chest and old-school moral compass to the selfless pursuit of The Truth.
That would be U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), whom we meet as he's growing fidgety about chasing those phantom weapons stockpiles through the blistering Iraqi desert while higher-ups lounge poolside in a commandeered Baghdad palace. Pitched headfirst into the territory of civilian spin and cover-ups, the good soldier exclaims in wonder when a veteran CIA officer (Brendan Gleeson, enjoying himself) agrees that the chemical weapons don't exist: "I thought we were all on the same side," Miller marvels.
The barnacled old operative tells our hero not to be naive, coughing up a million bucks in cash to divert Miller into going after the real threat to democracy in Iraq: a fugitive Baathist leader called al-Rawi. (This gentleman is capably played by Israeli actor Igal Naor, who must be getting a lot of ribbing back home for his new franchise playing Arab heavies for Hollywood.)
British actor Jason Isaacs plays Lt. Col. Briggs, the special forces commander who threatens Miller's mission. Universal hide caption
British actor Jason Isaacs plays Lt. Col. Briggs, the special forces commander who threatens Miller's mission.
Pardon the arch tone, but from which foreign planet has the rube-ish Miller recently landed? Needless to say, neither he nor anyone like him exists in Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, the award-winning book by reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran on which Brian Helgeland's testosterone-fueled script is very, very loosely based.
Miller's nemesis Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), on the other hand, is clearly modeled on Paul Bremer, the hair-raisingly unqualified civilian brought in to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq. Returned Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi (Raad Rawi) makes a clueless appearance as well, along with disgraced New York Times reporter Judith Miller, thinly disguised as an overzealous Wall Street Journal correspondent (Amy Ryan) who takes the bait of false intelligence and runs with it.
For the film's purposes, the fact that we know the rest already means that the weight of the action must be deflected from payoff to process. Still, with its pounding score and kinetic chases through the warrens of Baghdad streets, Green Zone adds up to a decent thriller, though more in the propulsive, high-gloss style of the two Bourne movies Greengrass and Damon made together than in that of United 93, with its arguably more apt brand of verite terror.
If In the Loop gloried in cynicism about human nature and the political process, Green Zone comes off as an awkward compromise between British iconoclasm and Hollywood's abiding need for a Good American to steer the story toward a positive outcome, earned or not. The movie declares its sympathy for Iraqis caught between insurgents and hard-line Baathists, and it gleefully synchronizes George Bush's absurd roar of triumph ("Mission Accomplished!") with Iraq's collapse into factionalist chaos. Miller's Iraqi interpreter ( United 93 's Khalid Abdalla), who has risked his life more than once to bring democracy to his country, gets to take a critical potshot — and to admonish Miller that "It is not up to you to decide what happens here."
But I'll leave it to you to guess who limps off home on his gammy leg, leaving the Lone Ranger to turn all Dirty Harry and fire off e-mails to the international press, informing them that they've been lied to every which way but loose. Which leaves Green Zone helplessly flapping its hands, trapped between a critique of and an advertisement for American arrogance abroad.
- Cast & crew
- User reviews
Discovering covert and faulty intelligence causes a U.S. Army officer to go rogue as he hunts for Weapons of Mass Destruction in an unstable region. Discovering covert and faulty intelligence causes a U.S. Army officer to go rogue as he hunts for Weapons of Mass Destruction in an unstable region. Discovering covert and faulty intelligence causes a U.S. Army officer to go rogue as he hunts for Weapons of Mass Destruction in an unstable region.
- Paul Greengrass
- Brian Helgeland
- Rajiv Chandrasekaran
- Jason Isaacs
- Greg Kinnear
- 315 User reviews
- 266 Critic reviews
- 63 Metascore
- 6 nominations
Top cast 99+
- Clark Poundstone
- Seyyed Hamza
- Al Rawi Bodyguard
- (as Faical Attougui)
- (as Michael Dwyer)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
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Did you know
- Trivia Many of the soldiers in Matt Damon 's WMD unit were actual Iraq War and Afghanistan War veterans, not actors. Damon said his biggest challenge was knowing he was an actor who was giving orders to actual soldiers.
- Goofs Like most films situated in the Middle-East this movie was filmed in Morocco. The streets are filled with French cars that you would not find in Iraq and scenes of men in crowds wearing the Moroccan common dress.
Freddy : [to Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller] It is not for you to decide what happens here.
- Connections Featured in The Rotten Tomatoes Show: Saw VI/Cirque du Freak/The Vampire's Assistant/Amelia (2009)
- Soundtracks Aboun Salehoun Written by Youssef El Mejjad , Pat Jabbar Performed by Amira Saqati Courtesy of Barraka El Farnatshi Prod.
User reviews 315
A thriller that doesn't forget its political foundations.
- jamesgill-1
- Apr 13, 2010
- How long is Green Zone? Powered by Alexa
- Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
- Was there any link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks?
- March 12, 2010 (United States)
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Official site (France)
- Studiocanal (France)
- Imperial Life in the Emerald City
- Academia General del Aire, San Javier, Murcia, Spain (Iraq exteriors)
- Universal Pictures
- StudioCanal
- Relativity Media
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- $100,000,000 (estimated)
- $35,053,660
- $14,309,295
- Mar 14, 2010
- $113,377,594
- Runtime 1 hour 55 minutes
- Dolby Digital
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COMMENTS
Rated: 2.5/4 Aug 22, 2023 Full Review Jason Best Movie Talk With Greengrass at the helm, deploying his trademark, Bourne-style shaky camerawork and rapid-fire cutting, Green Zone is as fast-paced ...
"Green Zone," directed by Paul Greengrass, is a thriller that makes no claim to be based on fact, but provides characters and situations that have uncanny real-life parallels. Its director made two of the "Bourne" films, and imports his approach to Baghdad, starring Matt Damon as an unstoppable action hero.
'Green Zone' is an action-thriller film directed by Paul Greengrass and stars Matt Damon, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, and Jason Isaacs in the lead roles.It revolves around a US Army Chief Warrant Officer's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It has received a mixed response from critics, with praise directed toward's its action sequences.
In "Green Zone," action under pressure is a test and a revelation of character. SKIP ADVERTISEMENT. ... Movie Review | 'Green Zone' A Search for That Casualty, Truth. Share full article.
'Green Zone' is an excellent movie that will be thoroughly enjoyed by fans of political conspiracy thrillers. It isn't presented as factual, and only fools would look to a movie for facts. For facts, read books or, better yet, read the Iraq Intelligence Commission Report and the Butler Review.
In "Green Zone," director Paul Greengrass brings the frenetic, run-and-gun style with which he utterly transformed the movie thriller in the Jason Bourne series to a different kind of thriller ...
During the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and his team of Army inspectors were dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that inverts the purpose ...
Green Zone is a 2010 action thriller film [4] directed by Paul Greengrass and written by Brian Helgeland, based on the 2006 non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran.The book documented life within the Green Zone in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. [5]The key players in the film are General Mohammed Al-Rawi (), who is hiding in Baghdad ...
Movie Review - 'Green Zone' - Where Good Intel Is Hard To Find Paul Greengrass' new Iraq war film takes a hard look at American hubris, but critic Ella Taylor says the propulsive thriller has ...
Green Zone: Directed by Paul Greengrass. With Igal Naor, Said Faraj, Faycal Attougui, Aymen Hamdouchi. Discovering covert and faulty intelligence causes a U.S. Army officer to go rogue as he hunts for Weapons of Mass Destruction in an unstable region.