by Jack Lee
(Warning some spoilers) Here we go again, another Hollywood war movie that suggests a sinister plot within the U.S. government, how unoriginal.
The movie takes much of its story from many true events in the Iraq war and then adds their own revision of history which predictably makes us look worse than the people we were at war with.
Matt Damon’s Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum involved a secret government/CIA program that was out of control and so have so many other movies over the last 30 years.
Enough already, we get it, you guys in Hollywood have a dislike for anything capitalist or our government. You could do so much better at the box office if it were not for your penchant for ragging on everything America does abroad. Universal and its financing partner, Relativity Media, spent about $100 million to produce “Green Zone” and tens of millions more to market the picture, meaning it will be a major money loser thanks to Hollywood’s over done cynical obsession that mainstream Americans are tired of seeing.
I can’t even see a sci-fi movie like Avatar without leftist propaganda woven into the plot. In Avatar the audience is supposed to moved to cheering on the ecologoically friendly indigenous people valiantly killing U.S Marines who are minions of the ruthless capitalist pigs exploiting someone else’s natural resources. Good grief, give us a break, leave the propaganda out of our movies!
In the Green Zone our collective badness is underscored on a number of levels with allegations of sheer incompetence and ruthless indifference. There’s this clip of “W” on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln giving his “Mission accomplished!” speech and the movie audience is supposed to laugh at his stupidity in the light of history, but if anyone was laughing I couldn’t hear them.
(Spoiler) According to the Green Zone the only reason we invaded Iraq was to impose democracy and the WMD issue was just a big scam. This is somewhat believable in the light of what was said by the Bush Administration and what was not found and this is the mistake the movie exploits.
In the beginning we see the Americans busy looking in all the obviously wrong places for WMD’s, yet another indication of how really dumb we are.
Meanwhile, the peace process is going poorly because the Iraqi people are growing frustrated and angry because of a lack of centralized control and a breakdown in basics, including Baghdad’s water supply. We just can’t do anything right.
Washington (under Bush) is portrayed as totally clueless about the needs and wants of the locals. Of course our bungling is not enough, we’re also shown doing cruel things to Iraqi prisoners too, gotta get that malevolent American cruelty in there!
After several key sites turned up zip in the way of WMD’s, nobody except one Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, played by Matt Damon, suspects something stinks. Even the generals seem oblivious, but not ol Matt. Everyone in the military has been fooled because we don’t question orders and we’ve placed too much faith in a mysterious figure in Iraq that has been feeding us bad intel – allegedly. “The script challenges America’s reason to invade Iraq was at best questionable, and at worst dead wrong.” Anon. review.
Chief Miller (Damon) is forced to go rogue. He violates his mission orders and single handedly solves the big conspriracy and in doing so he exposes the real reason we went to war. He begins working with a wise, but aging CIA agent who well understands the situation and the Iraq people, but he too is also obstructed at every turn by the evil side of our great (rightwing) conspiracy.
Damon’s nemesis is U.S. Envoy Poundstone from the Pentagon (Greg Kinnear). Poundstone is using his virtually unlimited authority to keep Damon from discovering the truth. In the process we see Kinnear and others of his ilk mismanaging just about everything a Washington bureaucrat could mismanage.
What really irritated me was seeing a Special Forces ODA Team playing the role of Kinnear’s robotic bad guys. I know a lot of those guys, most served in Iraq and this is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
I think it’s no coincidence that Kinnear looks a whole lot like our original envoy, Paul Brenner. Kinnear calls for a press conference to thwart Damon and imprudently disbands the Iraqi Army just when they are needed most (dumb), and as you may recall this is what Brenner and Bush did too. This explains why all the insurgents rose up against us, implies the director, Paul Greengrass.
Let me sum it like this, Jarhead loser – Hurt Locker winner and the Green Zone falls somewhere in between. I give it a 4 out of 10 only because of the action scenes – the plot really sucks. No wonder Alice in Wonderland throughly trounced Damon in the Green Zone.