Green Zone

Very political, either you love it or hate it

The Story:

During the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) and his team of Army inspectors were dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one bobby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that inverts the purpose of their mission.

Spun by operatives with intersection agendas, Miller must hunt through covert and faulty intelligence hidden on foreign soil for answers that will either clear a rogue regime or escalate a war in an unstable region. And at this blistering time and in this combustible place, he will find the most elusive weapon of all is the truth.

Release Date: March 12, 2010 (wide)
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Directed by: Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum)
Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, Jason Isaacs, Yigal Naor
Budget: $100,000,000
Gross Revenue: $98,153,660 (worldwide), $14,309,295 (US)

Review:

The 2010 Oscar’s winner for best picture, The Hurt Locker, has set a new standard in war movie genre. It have proved that gunfighting doesn’t have to be the core element for war movies. Character plays, smart plot, and tense scenes also can make this kind of movie thrilling.

Apparently, Green Zone tries to adopt the same formula.

The plot began with Roy Miller, a U.S. soldier, led a team to recover WMD from some locations in Iraq. But wherever they went, they seem to received a bad intel, which only put them in danger for nothing. Tired of this nonsense, Miller tried to held his own investigation with the help of the locals and other government agency that had the same thought with him.

During his investigation, he found the shocking truth about the reasons behind Iraqi war. Everything that he stood for are just a mere bullshit. He and his fellow soldiers were betrayed by some people in his own government. What will he do next?

From this point on, the movie’s plot is going so fast, that you need to have a full concentration to follow the story. Although this movie is a war drama, it’s pretty good in building tense, and the action sequences, although not spectacular, are properly fit into the plot.

While for the characters, director Paul Greengrass seems to know how to exploit Matt Damon’s quality, because they have worked together in Bourne franchise. Unfortunately, the other characters did not get enough proportions for their own.

The political theme behind this movie was arguable ever since the U.S. invasion on Iraq. Does it true that Iraq had a WMD or not? When the movie tried to lift this issue, the result are predictable. Some people will like it while the others won’t. The fact that this movie was flop in U.S box office but have a pretty good income worldwide, shows that the people of America still believe that the Iraqi war was for a good cause, whatever it was….

My Rating: B-
IMDb user rating: 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes meter: 55%
Metacritic: 61/100
Yahoo! critics: B
Yahoo! users: B
Your Ratings: (4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
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