We all know the Iraq wars were started over oil.
But let's take a look at who's really profiting here: the movie industry.
Think about it. Avatar, which has made more money than the guy who invented gold, is basically blue-skinned insurgents fighting off Space Blackwater. Best Picture-winner The Hurt Locker: also Iraq. And Inglourious Basterds is another trip to that deepest well of them all, World War II (featuring Hitler, Germany's own Darth Vader).
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Coincidence? The high stakes of war are natural fodder for dramatic movies, you say? Don't be naive. Look, Hollywood is making Battleship: The Movie. (Let's not get started on the board game industry's involvement in this globe-spanning conspiracy.) These people have no new ideas. Logically undeniably their only solution is to covertly start big fat wars they can mine for more movies. And to that I say "Sweet deal." Even when they're pretty ho-hum, such as Green Zone, war movies can be counted on for at least one rad firefight before they're over.
In the early days of the Iraq War, Matt Damon's WMD-hunting team keeps coming up empty. When he questions their intel, he's told to shut up and do his job.
A tip from civilian Khalid Abdalla puts Damon on the chase for general Yigal Naor, one of Saddam's top men. The hunt turns up clues about the missing WMDs, but Damon soon finds himself afoul of Greg Kinnear, an American intelligence liaison who wants Naor for himself.
Green Zone is directed by Paul Greengrass. You know, that guy whose shakycam made you barf in United 93 and the last two Bourne movies, you wuss. Apparently his jolting style is unappreciated by big babies everywhere whose ideal movie experience does not include the cinematographical equivalent of being shaken by the lapels until you drool on yourself.
Well, I like it, because it lets me pass off my drooling as the fault of the movie instead of my own slackjawed catatonia. And because Greengrass makes me feel as if my perceptions are racing to keep pace with the violence happening onscreen.
Green Zone's got that same shaky style, lending Damon's battles the chaotic, confusing feel of a conflict unfolding in real time. It's got part of Greengrass' other hallmark, too: a sense of understatement about all the seriously crazy junk his characters are going through.
Yet aside from that, it's got about as much personality as one of the socks in the inscrutable pile of white elastic on my closet floor. If you squint away some of the details, it could be swapped out for any other thriller set in a sandy, bomby place. To which I can only ask: What the hell's up with you, writer Brian Helgeland?
Some of your work, such as L.A. Confidential and Mystic River, comes off with the brilliance of a Dr. Jekyll, while stuff like Man on Fire and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 are more like the brute mechanism of Mr. Hyde. I mean, Damon had more character in the Bourne movies, and he couldn't even remember his own name because of the multiple gunshot wound-induced amnesia. Damn, those movies were sweet.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah, how Green Zone's story arc is as predictable as that of the Earth around the sun, and Newton figured that out like 30 years ago.
The end result is a pretty standard thriller, if a (too) pointedly angry one. If you like Greengrass' other stuff, a few of Green Zone's scenes will dig their hooks into you. If not, skip it.
Grade: B-
