Green Zone

To be fair, Green Zone saddles itself with the unenviable task of educating a mass audience on concepts like de-Baathification and the ethnic divisions that continue to make the dream of a unified, democratic Iraq maddeningly elusive. But it does establish a clear through-line in Damon, who stars as an Army warrant officer whose unit is tasked with finding the WMD that were ostensibly America’s reason for going to war. As mission after mission comes up empty, the increasingly disillusioned Damon starts questioning the identity and motives of “Magellan,” the highly protected source of this faulty information. In his quest for the truth, he aligns himself with a CIA operative (Brendan Gleeson) with similar goals, but comes into conflict with a Pentagon neo-con (Greg Kinnear) who treats the WMD problem like a PR kerfuffle.

Based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life In The Emerald City, Green Zone works brilliantly whenever it gets its hands dirty and follows Damon through the chaos of a city without electricity, water, or the most basic security and order. It also explicates, as well as it can, the post-war mistakes laid out by documentaries like No End In Sight, specifically the tragic arrogance and stupidity of officials who decided to dismantle the Iraqi military and its bureaucratic infrastructure. But whenever Greengrass and his screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, pull back and look at the bigger picture, Green Zone suddenly turns into something like Oliver Stone’s W., a clunky assortment of hindsight-aided quotes and talking points masquerading as recent history. It’s an important lesson, but Greengrass, against his nature, feels too inclined to spell it out for us.