Movie Review - Green Zone

As you read below, Green Zone was the first of two movies that I watched last Tuesday afternoon while we theatre-hopped.

Green Zone is yet another movie about the United States continuing conflict in the Middle East and is specifically about the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. It is a pretty intense look at the interaction between the military and the Iraqi people and between the different branches of government/military.

This is a difficult movie to review for a couple reasons. First, I just saw The Hurt Locker a few weeks ago and it was amazingly realistic... that is, not that I've been to Iraq/Afghanistan, but it didn't have any of the over-the-top Hollywood vehicles that plague so many movies. The Hurt Locker just felt clean to me.

Green Zone had a bunch of that going at the start, but then toward the end it became a caricature of itself toward the end. It's like some film producer said, we have to make this MORE dramatic and MORE extraordinary and in doing so, made the movie much weaker than it could have been.

The other reason why this is a difficult movie for me to review is due to my politics and all the stuff I have read about the War in Iraq. I cannot objectively tell if this movie was liberal, right on, or what. What I do know is that most of what was shown in the movie follows from what I read in two books, "Iraq Confidential" by Scott Ritter and "Chain of Command" by Seymour Hersh. Scott Ritter is an ex-Marine who headed up the UN Inspection Teams in Iraq in the search for WMDs. All the evidence that he provided to Clinton and Bush pointed to the fact that no WMDs existed and that the intelligence saying that they did was incorrect. Both Ritter and Hersh explored the relationship between the White House and the CIA, specifically that Bush insisted on looking at the raw intelligence data without allowing for the CIA to utilize experts to analyze the intelligence reports. Many of the Bush policies were based on inaccurate intelligence because of the lack of analysis.

As I re-consider the movie, I don't like that the end of the movie and its over-dramatization took away from the accurate information it was showing earlier in the film. All in all, I thought that the movie was done well. I really liked Matt Damon and the role he played. It just didn't need to be so over-wrought.