Green Zone: A Humble Movie Review

Green Zone is one of those movies where a majority of casual movie goers will enjoy but heavily scrutinize by critics and people who are obsessed of conducting anti-war demonstrations. Again, like always, I am a sucker with action movies and I love this movie.

Green Zone is the story of a group of soldiers led by Matt Damon as Miller, conducting raids to the supposed locations of WMD or Weapons of Mass Destruction, which is the basis of why US and its allies invade Iraq in the first place. Upon discovery of finding nothing on this locations provided by their intelligence he began questioning the credibility of the source, which leads him to his own personal investigations finding the terrible truth of the invasion. The action sequences on were top notched and you will probably think Damon is portraying a younger version of Jason Bourne of the Bourne Trilogy, which he also played. Many online movie goers refer Green Zone as Bourne 4, a prequel of some sort. The only difference between Bourne and Miller’s character is that one is a special operations guy and the other guy is the charismatic chief warrant officer.

The shootout sequence greatly reminds me of Black Hawk Down, complemented with the expected shaky cam. Paul Greengrass, the director should lessen the shaky cam shots because they were excessive. Shaky cams were heavily used during the first quarter and the last part of the movie Thank god they lessen those shots on the majority of the film.

I praised the performance of Khalid Abdalla (Freddy, Miller’s translator)  and Yigal Naor (General Al Rawi, one of the antagonists). Even though they are not Iraqi nationals, I think they were both from Israel, but they pulled off a very convincing Iraqis and you can see in their mindset that they want the Americans give them their most sought complete freedom of their country.

The film highlights all the internal blunders of the government that leads them to an unnecessary invasion and potential civil war. For the past three movies that I watched (Edge of Darkness, From Paris with Love, and now with Green Zone) there is always one bad ass CIA guy and this time he was portrayed by Brendan Gleeson. He is like one of the last guys trusted by Miller and one of the potential instruments of declaring the whole truth of the invasion to the world. Gleeson’s character clashes with the Pentagon asshole named Poundstone, portrayed by Greg Kinnear throughout the movie. As the CIA wants to uncover the truth through the assistance of Miller, Poundstone intervenes and tries to convince the world that the US occupation of Iraq is necessary.

Of course, this leads everybody chasing everyone else, and I love how the main climax ended and how we treated with the epilogue. The movie is good in delivering the conflicts of political bullshit of the war, but don’t expect it as a full on war movie like the Black Hawk Down. Expect very aggressive but few shaky cams and cover your ears due to amount of really loud gun battles.

I highly recommend this movie, have it in your DVD collection later, either pirated or the real original version. I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars of awesomeness.