CURRENT AFFAIRS : "GREEN ZONE"

Anyone who has so much as glanced at world events over the last couple of years can make an educated guess as to what the “green zone” refers to. And where exactly it is. The backdrop for our last war film this week is one of the most recent wars, the war in Iraq. The film has many advantages, a director experienced in the action / thriller genre, Paul Greenglass who can proudly add the direction of The Bourne Ultimatum and the Bourne Supremacy to his list of achievements. The lead actor of the film is also a familiar name, Matt Damon, whose performance in the Bourne Trilogy has gone down in action movie history. Plus of course, there is the marked advantage of it being a recent film about a recent war; emotions concerning the war run high making the audience (potentially anyway) that much more involved in the film and of course there aren’t that many films about it yet; the Second World War and the Vietnam War, although the backdrops of some of the best films in history are now generally considered “hackneyed subjects”. The Iraq war is “fresh” so to speak. In short, the film seems to promise a lot. I am happy to tell you, it delivers.
Chief Warrant Officer Miller (Matt Damon) has been in Iraq for a while now, and he has begun to smell a rat. He and his team are on an important mission; finding the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein is said to have hidden around the country. They receive intelligence report after intelligence report, hit location after location, but they come up with nothing. Miller doesn’t believe in coincidences of such great size and begins to question the sources of the intelligence they are given. After all, the weapons are the reason the army is in Iraq, Miller considers it his duty to sort out what is going on. And the more he digs the bigger the mystery seems to become, Miller will finally be pushed to go rogue to discover the truth… Such discoveries can however, be dangerous. Even fatal.
Another advantage this film has is, without a doubt, is the fact that a lot of us have seen quite a bit of coverage of the war. Greenglass has made a clever choice as far as filming is concerned, favoring a style very close to documentary or news report coverage to show the actual fighting. The pictures are not necessarily clean-cut, they are definitely shaky, in short they are not the squeaky – clean typical action film shots. They do however; give us the eerie impression of watching something that is actually happening. Thus, at the point of getting into the story the adrenalin is pumping already. Then of course the second “layer” of action comes along, namely the discovery and attempt to unmask the conspiracy that is going on. The film is actually based on a book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone")by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Now I haven’t read the book, but the story told on the screen was 24 karat gold. And the suspense doesn’t let up for one minute; although we have all seen our fair share of “conspiracy theory movies” (the afore mentioned Bourne Trilogy being one of them), Green Zone has enough curveballs in store to throw the oldest of film veterans off track. I can understand why one might have a general aversion to war films as a rule. In some examples, there tends to be an over-reliance on action and explosions to the detriment of the story, especially in modern times. Not so this little beauty. It shows us the horrors of war realistically and without getting over-dramatic, it presents a clever plot without getting convoluted and over-doing itself. A good ‘un, no doubt.