*** Official GREEN ZONE Discussion Thread

This doesn't really have to do with anything about the movie, but I just realized how different this pairing of Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear was in comparison to their first literal pairing in "Stuck on You".  Heh.

The trailers note that this movie is based on Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an excellent book about how hubris and poor planning can lead to an entirely preventable catastrophe and how decent intelligent people begin to undo some of the damage. The author's portrayal of the Bush administration could be scathing at times, but mainly he worked to present a fly on the wall portrayal of life inside the Green Zone in the days and months following the invasion of Baghdad.

But the footage in the trailers seems to present an action/thriller focused on the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, which the book barely touched upon, and full of far-left conspiracy theories about the CIA that the book certainly didn't speculate on and history has seemed to disprove. That's not a movie I'm interested in seeing. I'm never comfortable with movies that are too cavalier at blurring the line between reality and fiction. Oliver Stone's presidential biopics JFK, Nixon and W. all bothered me for the same reason.

In fact, the film sticks pretty close to the broad outlines of established history, inventing only one item (the "Magellan" source) that, I would argue, is a MacGuffin in both the film and actual historical events (the latter point being something on which I can't elaborate under the HTF Rules). I enjoyed watching it, but the film has a strange quality. It's an expertly crafted action thriller that, for all its kinetic style, plays like a train wreck in slow motion, because you know exactly where it has to end.

Just a side note: The CIA, as represented by Brendan Gleeson's character, are presented as good guys, who were trying (unsuccessfully) to head off the insurgency.

Thanks for correcting my impression, Michael. What you describe sounds much more interesting. Greengrass's United 93, which took advantage of the 9/11 Commission Report to do as an excellent job sticking to established fact and reasonable speculation as is possible within the confines of a two hour film, also has a surreal quality since we knew exactly how it would end. There was a surprising intensity to watching the horrors play out again in real time. I would imagine that Greengrass's Bloody Sunday has a similar quality.

I would still be more interested in a proper adaptation of Imperial Life in the Emerald City. We've gotten a lot of movies about the soldiers, which is right and proper, but the last time foreign nationbuilding has been attempted on the scale of Iraq was post-WWII with the Marshall Plan. Mr. Chandrasekaran's book proved that the civilian side of the story can be at least as gripping.