Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Green Zone Blu-ray Movie Review

It may be impossible to separate how you respond to 'Green Zone' from how you respond to the Iraqi War in general.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 17, 2010

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is repeatedly on record stating that even had the American government known that Saddam Hussein was not harboring “weapons of mass destruction,” the United States still would have (and indeed should have) invaded Iraq if for no other reason than to put an end to a too-long era of horrendous abuses of a power mad dictator. I’ll leave it to wiser heads to decide whether Cheney’s comments withstand the scrutiny of history, but Cheney’s own point of view is part and parcel of the subtext of Paul Greengrass’ action thriller, Green Zone, which reunited the director with his Bourne star Matt Damon. Liberally adapted from journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s 2006 treatise Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, the film plies some familiar political conspiracy territory in a largely unfamiliar location, the war-torn streets of Baghdad. Featuring a slew of visceral action sequences, all offering Greenglass’ hallmark quick cut editing style mixed with the jiggly handheld camerawork that is meant to jolt the viewer into a “you are there” experience, Green Zone wants to have its filmic cake and eat it, too. Perhaps because we’re still so close to the subject at hand, the film’s political posturing may not go down as easily with a lot of viewers as its exciting action and battle segments will.

Matt Damon as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, on the hunt for WMD's.

Damon portrays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, whose mission it is to find those elusive WMD’s that were our ostensible reason for invading Iraq. Miller quickly discovers that all of the supposed intel he has been given is faulty, perhaps purposefully so, as site after site he visits is woefully devoid of any potentially dangerous material. Miller soon finds his suspicions confirmed by a CIA agent named Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), who lets slip the fact that Miller’s next site is also going to turn up empty, as it had already been reconned several months prior. Playing out against this scenario is an interlinked plot featuring Pentagon official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), who is busy fending off probing questions from Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), while also attempting to micromanage the construction of a new Iraqi government. Suffice it to say that as with all cinematic furtive Pentagon officials, Poundstone’s motives are not entirely innocent, and Miller’s frustration and Poundstone’s obfuscations soon are colliding in an epochal denouement that questions the very basis for an Iraqi invasion.

Green Zone came in for quite a bit of criticizing on right-leaning media outlets like Fox News for its supposed anti-American bias. There’s no denying the film is resolutely anti-propaganda, it just so happens in this particular instance we’re faced with the perhaps discomfiting fact that it’s the Americans doing the propagandizing. This is the same argument which conflated opposing the Iraqi invasion with not supporting our troops. One can rightly question misinformation (even disinformation, as Green Zone posits) which leads to war without ever questioning the motives of the soldiers fighting that war. In fact it’s to Green Zone’s credit that the focus of the film is quite squarely on the shoulders of a soldier on the front lines. It actually helps to make the film’s political thesis all the more untenable for most viewers, as Damon’s character is such a stand up guy and seems to be a David unable to really battle this personal Goliath.

What director Greengrass does brilliantly (and unapologetically) is portray the absolute chaos Baghdad (and the rest of Iraq by proxy) devolved into after the American invasion had succeeded and Saddam had been toppled. Hussein was without a doubt a despicable dictator, but he kept his country reigned in and well-behaved, so to speak. What Green Zone makes frighteningly clear is the absolute vacuum created by Saddam's exit, a vacuum which threatened to suck the United States military into its gaping maw, something neither the Pentagon nor the CIA seemed to have planned for. The teeming scenes of street life in and around Baghdad are among the most visceral moments of the film and they help to create a disjointed ambience that makes Miller's frustration and confusion all too real.

If Damon is the American conscience of the film, the true-blue soldier there to help people and accomplish a mission (to coin a phrase), and Kinnear is on hand as the flip side of that equation, a scheming politico out for his own ends which perhaps he at least sees as being noble in terms of the end result if not in the getting there, then the Iraqi soul is summarized in the character of Freddie (Khalid Abdalla), a haunted, one-legged civilian who seeks to provide Miller with some intel and instead finds himself sucked up into an escalating power struggle within factions of the United States. It’s not especially subtle, considering the film’s emphasis on the dialectic between the Shiites, the Sunni and the Kurds on the Iraqi side of things, but it makes for a fascinating look at a national psyche scarred by years of terror and now undergoing the carnage of what perhaps is a senseless war. Freddie’s decision at the film’s climax is a perfect example of taking one’s fate into one’s own hands, and it attains an emotional power due largely to Abdalla’s impressive performance leading up to that moment.

Ultimately, though, Greengrass hedges his bets by attempting to paint the Damon and Kinnear characters in shades of black and white, when the entire film is figuratively a morass of gray. One almost expects these erstwhile nemeses to pop up wearing black and white hats so clear cut is the paint by numbers motivation given in Brian Helgeland’s screenplay. It certainly gives the audience a clear hero to root for (and an equally clear villain to hiss against), but it deprives the film of some nuance. The good news is Green Zone provides such an incessant adrenaline rush from its opening moments up to its devastating denouement that few if any will probably complain about this shortfall. Unlike the war it portrays, Green Zone exults in having clear lines drawn between the good guys and the bad. Somehow it makes the Iraqi war a little more tolerable, if no more comprehensible.

Green Zone Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Green Zone is filmed in an intentionally verité style that may leave some videophiles complaining about its VC-1 encoded 1080p image (in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio). The fact is this Blu-ray brilliantly reproduces Greengrass' original intent, with an amber-hued, slightly washed out look that brings the hot, fetid and dusty streets of Baghdad almost too close for comfort at times. Despite an abundance of grain and intentionally low contrast at times, detail here is spot on, at least from the "you are there" perspective the film employs. Swirls of dust snake through the obliterated cityscape with a sinister serpentine aspect, and the Blu-ray reveals extremely subtle shadings as they cover various buildings. Depth of field is excellent, especially in some of the aerial footage showing the ravages that "shock and awe" rained down on the Iraqi people. Some of the handheld footage is probably softer than some viewers are going to want, but again it brings a visceral quality to the film. The more staid set pieces are sharp as a tack, with an abundance of clarity and very subtle detail, as with the extremely pale streaks of blood that dot Damon's face after he has a run in with a Special Forces henchman.

Green Zone Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

From the first bombastic moments of Green Zone, you know you're in for a devastatingly immersive experience via its literally stunning DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Mortar shells fly over the listener's head, rifle fire zings in from what seems like a million different directions, the chaotic shouts of soldiers and Iraqi passers-by litter the air, and a general sense of doom and mayhem fill the soundscape. It all adds up to a visceral approximation of what soldiers experience in their everyday existence in Iraq, and it rarely lets up for the next two hours. The entire film is very low end heavy, not only from the incessant explosions and other sounds of battle, but also the foreboding drone of John Powell's creepy underscore, which proffers a real sense of subliminal menace with its sustained low tones. Dialogue is frankly not always easy to hear, but that is certainly the intent of the filmmakers, as they recreate the pandemonium of being in battle. Dynamic range is astounding here. Note for example the impressive sonic change between the subdued meeting of General Al-Rawi and how it then erupts into an aural free for all as Miller and his troops make a surprise entrance. Spanish and French DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks are also offered, as well as a Descriptive Video Service.

Green Zone Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Several good to excellent extras supplement Green Zone on Blu-ray:

• Deleted Scenes (HD; 12:27) are offered both with and without an optional picture in picture commentary by Damon, Greengrass and Greengrass' young son.
• Matt Damon: Ready for Action (HD 1080i; 9:47) offers a nice look at Damon bonding with the real life vets who play extras in the film.
• Inside the Green Zone (HD 1080i; 8:53) is a pretty standard EPK featurette with interviews and behind the scenes footage.
• U-Control offers two options, a Picture in Picture behind the scenes pop up feature, and a Video Commentary with Greengrass and Damon.
• Audio Commentary by Greengrass and Damon is better than average, offering some background on the piece while not shying away from the film's political posturing.

The film is also BD Live, pocketBLU and D Box enabled.

Green Zone Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Iraq war is still such a hot button topic that few will watch Green Zone without having an instant opinion about what they've seen. Greengrass does absolutely outstanding work depicting the chaos of Baghdad after the fall of Hussein, but the film falls just a tad short in crafting real life human characters in the parts of Miller and Poundstone. Though the focus of the film is squarely on the Miller character, my hunch is a lot of the audience is actually going to feel the most empathy for the shattered Iraqi, Freddie. There's little ambivalence here, despite the competing agendas and rationalizations Green Zone offers, but there is one hell of a roller coaster ride through an epochal chapter in both American and Iraqi history.