During the exciting, turbulent and eventually wayward course of “Green Zone,” Jason Bourne discovers the truth about weapons of mass destruction, then teaches an errant reporter from The Wall Street Journal how to be a good journalist.
In the interests of good journalism it should be said that this new film is a Jason Bourne thriller in spirit and sometimes in form, but not in factthe character played by Matt Damon, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, is an ostensibly ordinary soldier trying to do his duty. And it should be emphasized that the director, Paul Greengrass, and his cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd (who also shot “The Hurt Locker”) have achieved a surpassing sense of reality in the physical production. This is closer to what the war in Iraq, and the fog of war in Baghdad, must have looked like than anything previously captured in a fiction film.
Mr. Greengrass and his star have collaborated before, of course, with fairly spectacular results”The Bourne Ultimatum,” in 2007, and “The Bourne Supremacy” three years earlier. The difference this time starts with the source material. Instead of an extravagantly stylish adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel, the director was working from an overheated script by Brian Helgeland that claimsfor no reasons evident on screento have been inspired by a work of nonfiction, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s excellent “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” Miller, suspecting that Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s don’t exist, goes off on his own”off reservation” in military parlanceas a one-man truth squad bent on finding out who’s been lying to whom. For a while “Green Zone” generates genuine excitement, as well as plenty of provocationa fatuous surrogate for Ahmed Chalabi, a pervasive scorn for American planningbut then goes off its own reservation into a won’t-fly zone of awkward preachments and hapless absurdities.
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