Green Zone opens with a sequence of American soldiers in a newly “liberated” Iraq rushing to a site said to house weapons of mass destruction or WMD, as we all call them now. Of course there are no weapons there, whether of mass or minor destruction.
The leader of this army unit, Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), attends a briefing where WMD are discussed. He tries to ask about the “intelligence” that claims toilet factories and the like are really storehouses of WMD, but gets the brush-off. Soon he’s being sent on another wild goose chase, and this time there will be blood on the sand before he discovers — once more — the absence of WMD.
We know, now, that the United States government invaded Iraq on the pretence that its dictator, Saddam Hussein, was developing WMD that seriously threatened world peace. We know that “intelligence” was manipulated by the American government and its agents to make it look like there were WMD: reports providing evidence that were no WMD were fiddled with or, as the Brits had it, “sexed up”, to look like they said the opposite. The United Nations commissar looking for WMD in Iraq and not finding any was disregarded; Colin Powell was sent to lie to the UN, and the invasion went ahead.
It is not, therefore, much of a surprise to find an American soldier in Iraq failing to find WMD. If the plot of Green Zone revolved around only that issue, it wouldn’t be terribly exciting or much of a revelation. We hardly expect, eight years after the start of the invasion, and now that George W Bush has left power, to be riveted by a story the conclusion of which we already know.
That’s part of the trouble with movies “based on a true story”. If one’s reasonably informed about the people or events involved, there’s no suspense. Mira Nair’s Amelia Earhart biopic, for instance, wasn’t going to be able to keep us guessing about her last flight. The fact that Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean is probably one of the two or three things one remembers about her.
So the filmmaker working with such a narrative, as director Paul Greengrass is with Green Zone, has to take other routes through or around the story. Greengrass has also, of course, made hard-hitting documentaries, as well as two other Damon-starring thrillers, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. And then there’s his extraordinary reconstruction of what probably happened on United flight 93, one of the planes that was hijacked on September 11 2001, and the only one to hit the ground rather than a target.
Greengrass brings a quasi-documentary style to such reconstructions, as he did to the Bourne films: it’s like the jittery hand-held camera of cinéma vérité, tossed about in the turbulent wake of reality itself, is now at the service of a fictional story. And it sure helps to make that story feel more real. The camerawork on the Bourne films did a great deal to elevate them from the level of standard state-skulduggery thrillers to truly exciting chase movies with a wide paranoid streak. Greengrass does the same with Green Zone: he and the carefully wobbly camera go into the (recreated) heart of a country just invaded, in a state of war, and — for both invaders and invaded — a state of confusion.
The narrative is largely focused through Miller’s eyes, taking us from his realisation that there are no WMD to be found, though his doubts and questions, the cold shoulder he gets from shiny, slimy agents of the US government — and the surreptitious help he is given by a CIA agent who, in a perhaps rather old-fashioned way, is more interested in truth than propaganda.
And, in the course of this tale, we and Miller discover more about the chaos caused by the American invasion and why, in fact, it was always going to be likely that the invaders would fail to impose order on the country they had just stripped of its leadership — however deserving of deposition those leaders may have been.
The film is a veritable lesson in the triumph of ideology and self-deceived wishful thinking over plain hard honesty. And, whatever you think of what’s going on here, it’s undeniably exciting in the telling. If the very word “Iraq” and acronyms such as “WMD” are a turn-off, be reassured that Green Zone works as a thriller even if you don’t give a damn about US petro-imperialism, the lies of power, or the difficulties of those state employees who value the truth. I doubt Greengrass would want you to, but you can forget this is based on any kind of factual reality and just enjoy the gritty derring-do.