review: green zone

As with most reviews...SPOILER ALERT!

I'll be honest. I was highly skeptical going into the theater to see Green Zone. The trailer and billboards made it look like Jason Bourne Does Iraq, and I was half prepared already to write it off as a piece of high-budget Iraqsploitation.

Boy was I wrong. Green Zone, shall we say, kicked ass. It's a sharp, fast-paced, uncompromising political action flick with a deceptively radical message and not one walking blue metaphor involved. There is plenty of action (and, fair warning, plenty of trademark Greengrass QueasyCam). But luckily the film is infinitely smarter and more subversive than its marketing would suggest.

I'm tempted to say that Green Zone was the movie I wish The Hurt Locker had been, but that may be unfair. They're completely different films: in scope, in style, and most importantly in intention. In fact they are almost the antithesis of each other. If you want to see guys defusing bombs in Iraq, watch The Hurt Locker. If you want to know why the bombs are being planted, watch Green Zone.

In an earlier post, I criticized The Hurt Locker for its lack of context. Green Zone is all about context--about the lies that brought us to war and the malignant neglect, neoliberal arrogance and open brutality that fueled the Iraqi resistance. And high time for such a movie, too, lest we forget exactly how we got into this war and what the cost has been. And while The Hurt Locker is relentless in its American perspective, Green Zone tells us we're in a different, multi-polar world from its opening scene, when we're with Iraqis during the terrifying Shock and Awe bombardment.

Green Zone follows Roy Miller (Matt Damon), a good soldier on a noble mission, who increasingly comes to realize there's nothing good or noble about the occupation machine grinding away all around him, and that if he wants something even as simple as the truth, he needs to take matters into his own hands. Standing in his way is Clark Poundstone, a neocon mouthpiece who manages to combine the worst aspects of Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld into one be-suited Greg Kinnear-shaped package.

Greengrass, who mastered the ensemble political drama with Bloody Sunday, takes us effortlessly from the swimming pools and beer-drinking-reporter-filled luxury hotels of Baghdad's neocolonial Green Zone to the detention centers and torture chambers that are their dark, inevitable corollary. As with Bloody Sunday, complex interests are crystallized into individual characters whose goals throughout the film roughly approximate different political positions. It's an effective way of telling a story with not just two sides, but many, although people not familiar with the ins and outs of the early days of the Iraq occupation might want to bring Cliff notes. I was certainly glad I watched the excellent PBS documentary Bush's War last semester, so I could match up who everyone was supposed to be in real life.

Green Zone had already defined itself as an excellent political film before it reached the third act, but here was where it really knocked it out of the park. Because by far the best thing about Green Zone is that it does not suffer from a case of White Man Saves the Universe. In fact, it does a whole lot to subvert that paradigm, which is an absolutely brilliant thing to do when you've got Matt Damon running through your movie with lots of military hardware.

There is a moment in the third act when we can see the traditional heroic resolution coming, the point when Roy Miller is supposed to triumph and get his man. And it doesn't happen. Instead we get a twist so awesome it made me cheer. Damon's crusading soldier is upstaged by an Iraqi--a secondary character who would be a passive helping hand in a less sophisticated film, but here turns out to have agency and his own agenda that our American hero hasn't spared a split second to consider. And this character gets to deliver the film's most radical line, directed at Miller, and thus, by extension, all Americans: "It is not for you to decide what happens here."

Central to the way the third act plays out is the fact that Roy Miller never gets the whole picture. In the end, he's a dupe: outmaneuvered by an Iraqi, and later by a neocon for good measure. He's not so much outplayed as he is not even in the right game. Politically, this is the exact inverse of The Hurt Locker, in which the soldiers and the horizon of their immediate mission are paramount. In Green Zone, the mission is not only pointless but hopelessly misguided. Those Americans with good intentions are naive and uninformed, and those with malicious intentions are clever, blind to the destruction they cause, and generally in charge. "We won," says Poundstone near the end of the film, and he's not just talking about the American army. But as Iraq proves, it's awfully easy to win the battle and lose the war.