I give it a 9, 'cause since Black Hawk Down no war movie was realisticand good enough to keep me focused and interested till the very end !

It does have action, suspense and the story could be true indeed...Well, maybe those who love or like wars will re-think their position.Why ? Because people die in vain for no reason, just to feed some chiefin charge's vanity.

For a reason I am not fully aware, some things may be brought to thepublic through movies, so take it as it it if you don't want to bother.But if you do, then is it just a movie of an historic event in yourpresent life !

I watched this film with high expectations, hoping for a successfulcrossing between The Bourne Identity and The Hurt Locker. Instead, thefilm delivered a messy film that was painfully disappointing.

The first 40 or so minutes really create a solid platform for the filmand gave me false hope of a relatively good movie. It started to makesome suggestions about what was going to happen and was setup with allthe right characters.

And then it just fell flat on its back, with its one-dimensional endingand highly predictable resolution. The only surprise for me was themusic that played during the credits.

Overall, I'm a self-confessed sucker for Iraq/War movies (see HurtLocker, Traitor etc.) but the action in this film does not save it fromits poor use of story.

5.5/10.

Green Zone sees an American war from the perspective that we're not thechampions, not the badasses, but the rubes. Its understanding is thatIraq's fictitious "weapons of mass destruction" weren't there, thatneocons within the administration falsified them, lied about them, wereprepared to kill to conceal their ruse. That's definitely one morefeature of the emerging account that's increasingly surfaced aboutIraq, the, um, stunning awakening that we went to war under hollowpretenses. This is a thriller that presents characters and scenariosthat have candid true-life analogies, but it is a thriller. Itsdirector made the second and third Bourne films, and shoulders hisformula to Baghdad, starring Matt Damon as a relentless action hero.

However this thriller isn't just a thriller. It has a bottom line todefend: Pivotal disregards at the beginning rendered a capable andefficient victory unfeasible, and turned Bush's "Mission Accomplished"photo-op into a monumental misconception. At the heart of the plot isthe U.S.'s crucial mistake in the field, which was to fire the Iraqiarmy and leave them in limbo with their weapons. The Iraqi army had noparticular adoration for Saddam and might have had a beneficial,balancing impact. Rather, they were rendered jobless, estranged, armed.

Damon, playing Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, is at the beginningcommanding a sweep on a believed WMD storage site. Nothing there.Another sweep, meant to find weapons of chemical warfare, results innada. Since some of these seizures yield fatalities, he starts tochallenge the intelligence reports: He speaks out at a briefing, andsort of remarkably finds himself in confrontation with a U.S.intelligence agent named Poundstone, played by Greg Kinnear, completelypersuasive as always. Of course he's disciplined with the same oldplatitudes, told to carry out his orders, but is overheard by Brown, aburly, seasoned CIA man, a Middle East long-timer. Soon he's relayinghis concerns to Brown.

The CIA, as in real life, has no information to corroborate the WMDallegations, is removed from the discourse, and Poundstone's not onlythe engineer of the neocon fabrications, but their hatchet man, witheven a military group responsible just to him. Miller also meets a NewYork newspaperwoman (Amy Ryan, whose versatility I find amazingwhenever I watch her after seeing her in something else before), whosereports about a classified Iraqi informant have accredited the WMDpropaganda. From her, he finds that Bath Party Gen. Al Rawi met withPoundstone in Jordan, yet, contrary to the reference Poundstone pointedout, plainly told him Saddam had no WMDs. So the bad intel wasmanufactured to rationalize the war the neocons wanted. Also aconsiderable leg up for Miller is Freddy, a local who begrudginglyrisks his life to be that, functioning as a translator and providingthe film's most essential bit of dialogue.

Have I made the storyline seem complicated? Paul Greengrass andscreenwriter Brian Helgeland unfold it with definite simplicity.Character reduction and pigeonholing equal a thicket of deceptionaccessible to foreign policy lay people. I guess that's fine. I mean,if we look at seminal films portraying true accounts of war's immediateexperience, we're not watching good vs. evil. We're watching everyonebeing corrupted by the obligatory nature of killing, witnessing so manybeing killed, and the bankruptcy of policy that leads to millions ofsouls being sent to do that. In a way, distilling it into a thrillerplot, a clear-cut hero, a clear-cut villain, as well as to bring it tothe screen with such a naturalistic approach, seems to trivialize howwar's always enticing to young men who know nothing of it first-hand,how their blood earns glory for those who continue not to. There are nounscathed soldiers in war.

Nevertheless, Green Zone doesn't trivialize the injustice being done tomillions of people over there right now. It puts us right in theirfaces. Damon's Miller's not just the movie's hero because he runs,jumps, shoots, kills, but because he inherently understands that blindfaith will get him and his men killed. He's the voice of protest whenit's needed most, when the gushing of "fife and drum," parroted by themedia and the pulpit, is demanding him and his men conform, keep step,comply in silence with the sovereign word of command. The action iscaptured with tons of quick cuts flanked by hand-held shots. Despiteall our assumptions that it'd be like another Bourne film, it featuresno action sequences that are a hundred-to-one realistically. When wesee a chase that couldn't happen in the real world, we automaticallybecome conscious of the visual effects. When they could happen, we'reconsistently conscious of the story.

This movie has been on the inevitable hit list of those continuing torationalize the fabricated intelligence we accepted as a justificationto raid Iraq. Indeed, truth tends to be war's first casualty. Yes, thefilm too is fiction, uses implausible long-shots and implausibly putsone man in the middle of all the action. It is a thriller, not adocumentary. But the facts ever present and the essence of the neoconinjustices have by now been made very evident.

Pretty interesting stuff. If anyone needs convincing that genres andcinematic vocabularies are evolving, all they have to do is go to themovies. This one is a part of a new trend, the war-detective genre. Itis strictly noir, in the sense that forces outside our hero's world areat work on him. He is an ordinary Joe; he has amazing coincidenceshappen to him; he is trust into the role of detective and serves as ouron-screen surrogate as we discover together some hidden perfidy. Soinnovation number one is that we have a war-detective genre almostfully formed already.

The action is there for the same reason that smoke was 50-60 years ago,to enrich the screen. But this is no longer a war movie based on theassumptions of the founding genre. Then, we went to these to helpidentify as a tribe, to re-enforce that identity by celebrating itsnatural values and of course we have to win. Not here.

In this case, we have what is widely known about these wars. They werea mistake, based on fictitious realities coaxed out of tortureddetainees. The military here is not used to validate an identity, butto validate that we are estranged from the institutions we used totrust and venerate. Look at the characters: on the US side, everyone isa stock stereotype: smarmy Cheney factotum, grizzled CIA operative,earnest girl reporter, ,wild amoral snakeater, scads of lazy soldiersin battlefield luxury.

The only two interesting characters are Iraqi. They not only are realmen with complex motives, but they are the ones with agency.

I can see that they had some trouble with how critical to be of the menin uniform. Apparently, a whole subplot about abuse of luxuries atSadam's palace was jettisoned. Only a few scenes remain, necessary forthe main plot. But that whole business, together with the name, is leftdangling. I think the movie failed to make money because it is easy tobuy into an evil operation managed from the White House. But we stillfind it hard to not think of the man in theater as anything but noble.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.