Chasing Ghosts

Green Zone’s conspiratorial world
Nighttime. Baghdad. March 19, 2003. The city bursts into light as “Shock and Awe” sweeps across the desert. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum) begins his latest release, Green Zone, with a black screen as the sounds of air-raid warnings and the crescendo of American bombs slowly fills the theater. After a riveting skyline view of Iraq’s capitol city under siege in the opening hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the viewer is thrown into the terrifying perspective of an Iraqi awoken in the night to the sounds of war.
The scene cuts, and now the viewer is in the company of Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (a stoic Matt Damon), as he frantically searches a Baghdad facility for weapons of mass destruction. Greengrass’s characteristic slingshot camerawork and skilled pacing masterfully convey a sense of immediacy. In the first two scenes alone, Green Zone creates a world that more closely resembles the maelstrom of Iraq than any film yet.
Unfortunately, the film’s bracingly realistic style is soon put into the service of a caricature-laden plot and a thinly veiled leftist politics. This turn for the worse is disappointing but not all that surprising. Green Zone continues a long line of recent Hollywood films that fail to engage politics and war in all their grim and tragic complexity—resorting to one-dimensional characters, clichéd monologues, and a conspiracy theory-based plot.
Where are the Weapons?
Roy Miller and his squad keep coming up empty-handed at every potential WMD site they visit. Suspicious and frustrated, Miller teams up with Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a veteran CIA officer, and the two begin a rogue mission to determine the reason for the intelligence failures. Their efforts place them in opposition to Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a top official in the Department of Defense, and a composite figure clearly drawn from L. Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, and Douglas Feith. Poundstone is a quintessentially Machiavellian bureaucrat. His every move seems choreographed to provoke the viewer’s disdain.
Miller’s investigation also leads him to a close encounter with General Al Rawi, Saddam Hussein’s top general. Al Rawi becomes the missing link in Miller’s investigation. As he slowly puts the pieces together with the help of Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a Wall Street Journal reporter who was Poundstone’s mouthpiece in the run-up to the war, he begins to realize that Poundstone is hiding something about the missing WMDs. Predictably, to get to the bottom of things, Miller has to defy orders and take matters into his own hands—for a moment, one almost expects Poundstone to shout “Bourne’s gone rogue!” into a satellite phone.
Greengrass returns to form with a brilliant chase scene at the end of the film. As Miller and one of Poundstone’s cronies from Special Forces (Jason Isaacs) chase General Al Rawi through the streets of Baghdad, an American helicopter follows them from above as they weave and wind through the city’s tight neighborhoods amid a barrage of bullets. The editing in this scene is amazing, as the viewer switches between the three parties at a nearly inconceivable pace. When the dust has cleared, Baghdad is ablaze and the descent towards sectarian violence has begun. The sequence will remind fans of Greengrass’s admirable work in the last two Jason Bourne movies.
The Lessons of War
Nearly seven years have passed since the futile search for WMDs portrayed in Green Zone. With almost 4,400 American soldiers and countless Iraqi civilians dead, the country has witnessed the tragic and bitter consequences of war. Yet for some, the war provides the opportunity to promote a simplistic agenda. Green Zone’s paranoid plot does little to dispel the perception that Hollywood liberals can’t think of anything more sophisticated to say about Iraq than “Bush lied, people died.”
There is no doubt that a huge intelligence failure occurred in the run-up to the Iraq War. However, Greengrass turns the intelligence community into a locus of preposterous corruption, purposely constructed to justify American imperialism. Greengrass’s Iraq war is a game in which powerful officials push misinformation in order to lead innocent soldiers into a vicious, deadly quagmire. Reasonable critics and supporters of the war might enjoy the film, but they need not accept its maddeningly simplistic political message.
Jeffrey Lerman ‘13 is a Contributing Writer.
Photo Credit: The U.S. Army