Weapons of mass tension

Radical conservatives, tension haters and those who suffer from motion sickness beware. Green Zone might not be the movie for you.  

Adrenaline and anxiety hit as soon as the movie starts. Set during the first months of the U.S. occupation in Iraq, we witness one of the many bombings on Baghdad. Families are running for refuge as they look back to their beloved city being destroyed by U.S. and Iraqi military.  

After the extremely tense beginning, we get to meet U.S. Army Chief Warrant officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), who is in charge of a team dedicated to finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, after a couple of failed missions, Miller starts to question the intelligence reports. As he starts to raise questions, higher officers, especially Defense Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), start cataloging him as a threat. Soon Miller is stripped of his responsibilities and endures a pretty bad beating by Lt. Col. Briggs (Jason Isaacs).

While trying to find the truth, Miller meets an eager-to-help local, who he nicknames “Freddie” (Khalid Abdalla), and a Wall Street Journal writer with serious ethical issues, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). Ryan's character is convincing as a journalist who wants to get the story at any cost, without even wondering if the story is real. Somewhere in the movie we meet CIA station chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), but his character is a cliché of every single stubborn and rebellious agent we’ve seen in every movie.

The scene-stealers of the film are without any doubt, Briggs and Freddie. Isaacs’ portrayal of Briggs as a delightfully arrogant lieutenant colonel is amazing and one wishes that he had more screen time in the film.  However, Abdalla is the real star in this movie. He is charming but forceful when needed and manages to avoid stereotypes, something that happens to some of the less-experienced actors throughout the film.

Director Paul Greengrass manages to keep the audience tense during the entire film, not to mention dizzy. The camera is shaking all the time and making sharp movements in order to make the audience feel like they are in the middle of the battlefield.

With Freddie delivering a line like, “It is not for you to decide what happens here,” Green Zone doesn’t miss the opportunity to make its agenda pretty clear. Like any other war movie, it includes a bold political statement, but without any real shock factor. It gives little snippets of maybe-this-is-what-really-happened situations and provides a new conspiracy theory to ponder.

Is it biased? Yes, but Green Zone is also extremely entertaining and smart in its execution.