Green Zone
There is little doubt that Saddam Hussein was well established as âAmericaâs Boogymanâ throughout the decade of the 90s, and that The Iraq War, supposedly over his storing of WMDs, was just as much of a jarring effort to help the psyche of our country breathe a sigh of relief. That said, there remains much of a political and moralistic mess over the WMD issue, such that it led to the current despotic administration and many questioning if it was really âworth itâ. This release from last year, reuniting the Bourne Franchise star Matt Damon with director Paul Greengrass is certainly a damning, if fictional account of how our cause for the war became quite muddled. Damon plays an Army Chief tasked with leading raids on various facilities that supposedly store WMDs, only to come up empty each time. Eventually he questions, and becomes exposed to, the bureaucratic incompetence that led to one side of the U.S. Intel community constantly fighting with the other, which leads to Damon becoming a whistleblower to the truth. Even though the film was marketed as an action-packed war thriller, it is actually awfully dry at times, diluting the effect of the battle scenes with Greengrassâ patented shakycam technique while always putting across the political motivations of the filmmakers (and Damon), but not really coming through with that needed emotional punch. As said, the storyline of this film is completely fictional, and in no way resembles the real life debacle involving the intel that led to the search for WMDs, instead telling of a (fictional) Iraqi general who met with the CIA months before the war and stated plainly that there were no WMDs, yet was considered a âprimary sourceâ for the locations that the soldiers were sent to raid, with the apparent truth being that the slimy CIA guy in charge (Greg Kinnear) was literally picking places at random and sending the troops out to risk their lives. Others in the cast include Brendon Gleeson as the CIA operative with the opposing viewpoint that the raids are meaningless, Amy Ryan as the reporter trying to get to the bottom of the matter, Jason Isaacs as the evil Special Forces guy who brutally beats Damon for disagreeing with him (and grabs his ass while heâs down for good measure), and Khalid Abdalla as the Iraqi local who becomes Damonâs translator and serves as a reminder that Saddamâs removal WAS for the greater good. Certainly there are some elements of what occurred over there that are quite jarring, like showing a bunch of the bureaucrats lounging around Saddamâs palace and holding a never ending pool party, complete with pizza, beer, and girls in bikinis, as well as the beatings and torture that Isaacs and his cronies dish out regularly to Saddamâs loyalists. In the end, the viewer becomes convinced that Saddam MIGHT have been harboring Weapons Of Mass Destruction, but there was just so much jockeying from a bunch of pencil pushers (not to mention a six month notice before our invasion) that he may very well have had them shipped out of the country discreetly before we arrived so that we would look like fools to the rest of the world when we came up empty. The film is just about redeemed by its climax, where once again the emphasis is made that Saddam and his henchmen were better off dead and gone despite the shady reasons for the war, and perhaps the U.S. DID do a service getting rid of him that the U.N. and NATO were too squeamish to do. Overall, an interesting theory about the real life issues surrounding this most perplexing of recent warsâŚ
7/10