Film Review: Green Zone

This is another film set in turbulent, war torn Baghdad; the Green Zone being the area from which the Coalition Provisional Authority tried to govern Iraq in 2003.

Chief Warrant Officer Miller, (Matt Damon), is searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Yet each site he’s directed to reveal no weapons, (mass destruction or otherwise). No surprise there and, given the outcome, his time could just as well have been spent looking for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Miller is something of a thoughtful idealist, albeit one that is fighting fit and more than willing to shoot when necessary, takes his concerns over the lack of WMD to his superior officers. They don’t want to know; they urge him to keep searching his ‘target’ areas, irrespective of the outcome of these searches.

A somewhat disgruntled Miller then questions the reliability of the source providing these locations with Clark Poundstone, (Greg Kinnear), a shadowy intel operator for the Pentagon. Poundstone, who has his own reasons for not revealing the name of his source, is equally unsympathetic to Miller’s concerns and advises him to do his job and to keep his mouth shut.

Rumpled, bearish CIA agent Martin Brown, (Brendon Gleeson), seems to be the only U.S. operative in Baghdad with knowledge of the region, the local politics and the players involved. And he is unimpressed with Proudstone’s handling of the conflict. Brown’s theories are, however, as unwelcome at the White House and the Pentagon as a nun in a knocking shop and therefore no one in authority gives credence to his opinion. Brown offers Miller one piece of advice – locate and bring in a senior Iraqi, General al Rawi, (Igal Naor), perhaps the only Iraqi who knows what happened to the WMD.

There is also a cabal of Baa’thist Party Iraqi Army officers, commanded by General al Rawi, who meet in various safe houses. These former Saddam loyalists are biding their time until the Coalition Forces call upon them to restore law and order, as Iraq will remain ungovernable without their assistance. Proudstone betrays them by declaring the Baa’thist Party illegal and orders its members arrested.

From this point on it becomes a highly charged, visually choreographed search and destroy mission through the desolate wasteland outside of the Green Zone. Miller is in a race against a brooding Special Forces team that oozes menace to find and rescue General al Rawi. The Special Forces, acting on orders from Proudstone, are keen to permanently silence al Rawi and, if possible, Miller too. Miller just wants to know about the WMD.

If all this seems a bit farfetched, it is. Director Paul Greengrass has taken Ravi Chandrasekan’s book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”, which is inspired by events in the recent past and twisted it, so much so that almost nothing rings true.

Amy Ryan plays naive journalist Lawrie Dayne who is little more than a reporter of Proudstone’s views. Miller’s translator, convincingly portrayed by Khalid Abdalla, is a tangle of inner conflicts while we’re never sure whether or not to trust him.

Suspend belief for a couple of hours and The Green Zone is an exhilarating ride through the murky world of government duplicity and myopic politics: skills that President George W. Bush, and the ‘bombs and bibles’ crowd that surrounded him, had in spades.