Green Zone (2010)

Movie of the week

In Green Zone, The Bourne Identity action star Matt Damon goes to Iraq, or rather to a facsimile staged in Spain and Morocco, switching from a super-assassin’s identity crisis to contemporary political and military history.

The focus of this movie is on the early stages of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The writer, Brian Helgelund, reinvents Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction Imperial Life in the Emerald City as an action flick following Damon’s tough guy character.

As described in the documentary No End in Sight, the US government made a number of crucial mistakes in the run-up to the war and in how its occupation was run. Helgelund gets all this across, but in a mash-up that lacks credibility and logic.

Synopsis

Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and his men are assigned to find the “weapons of mass destruction” that would justify the recent invasion.

However, veteran CIA operative Martin Brown tells Miller that there are no weapons, and the ruse was created so the US could conquer Iraq and install a puppet leader. Brown correctly anticipates that, despite Bush’s gung-ho assurances, the ruse is doomed to be broken.

Also suspicious of Miller’s boss Poundsgate is Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne, who lets slip to Miller that Poundsgate told her he had secret talks in Jordan with an important Iraqi, code-named Magellan, who told him about the weapons. But it now seems likely Magellan’s information was to the contrary.