Honolulu Weekly

In his own heavily edited, hand-held, shaky-cam way, Paul Greengrass continues to analyze and lightly criticize America’s war on terror with Green Zone. The British director of the last two Jason Bourne movies seems to have devoted his career to observing our country’s contemporary military operations and more obviously with United 93, its relations in the Middle East. But just because he is obviously, and finally, critical of American foreign policy in his latest offering doesn’t necessarily mean the product is compelling.

Once again using Matt Damon, Green Zone follows Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) in Baghdad 2003 as he and his unit scour the desert for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Yet, they come up empty each time, or as Miller puts it: “Every site we hit on the way up here, we’ve rolled a doughnut.” Soon he discovers that the intelligence they are basing their missions on may be compromised, or, even worse, complete bull.

It’s very loosely based on the novel Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (Conspiracy Theory) clearly posit that WMDs did not exist and America went to war on false pretenses. It’s a liberal’s wet dream.

Casting Damon is a canny choice. The actor’s innate sense of goodness, which helped ground our sympathies in the Bourne flicks carries over to his character here. He developed a pronounced worry-wrinkle between his eyes and he furrows it as often as possible to demonstrate the emotion of frustration, but that’s about all he is allowed to do here.

Instead, John Powell’s noisy score provides the urgency. The infrequent action scenes are just as frenetically filmed. Greengrass really hates planting a camera–once again the action whips to and fro and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd employs the same shaky-camera style he used for The Hurt Locker. Jittery hand-held filming is apparently the chosen mis-èn-scene for contemporary war-in-the-Middle-East cinema. This is really just a run-and-gun thriller, and we learn nothing about these characters beyond their call of duty. We have zip invested in them. This wasn’t the case in The Hurt Locker, which was, incidentally, why that film worked so well. As examinations of male honor and violence, these contemporary war dramas are slowly becoming the Westerns of the 2010s. (Additional unfortunate and unavoidable factoid of comparison: An important figure in the plot of this film was one of the “packages” captured by the Ralph Fiennes character in the latter.)

Toward the climax of Zone, an Iranian tells a soldier, “It is not for you to decide what happens here.” Taking his work into cumulative consideration, United 93 now seems like an experimental project Greengrass needed to excise from his system in order to psyche himself up for the concrete conclusions of Green Zone. Perhaps if he makes another film in this unofficial trilogy, he will draw a compelling conclusion as well.