Green Zone (2010) - Paul Greengrass

So the star and director of the Bourne series team up yet again, this time for a romp around Iraq. 'It won't be like Bourne' swore Greengrass during the filming of this, 'people will be disappointed if they expect a Bourne type actioner', he claimed. Now the thing is the very idea of making some crappy action film about real life events, especially real life events that are going on now, and where people are you know actually dying makes me sick to my bones. But Paul Greengrass swore that wasn't the film I was sitting down to watch, and guess what?

The fucker lied. This ended up being the last film I saw in 2010. I'm kind of sad to say that I turned it off with only twenty minutes left of the running time, that's how poor it was. In fact I only turned it off after I realised that I was on line checking out and ordering Miles Davis box sets. Woeful. Basically Matt Damon is one of those good American soldiers that 'liberated' the Iraqi people. You know butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, the Iraqi's though are a right bunch of bastards, they keep shooting at the Americans and everything. It's enough to make you scream, it really is.

What little story there is revolves around an address book that shows all the safe houses that Saddam's generals use. There are some bad army people trying to cover stuff up (see it's not just the Iraqi's that are bad, some of the Americans are too), weapons of mass destruction, blah blah sodding blah. Lots of Greengrass' shaky cam, running around and shouting and all the usual hoi polloi that we've come to associate with these films is employed. It just doesn't work though. There is a sympathetic Iraqi character that helps Matt Damon, the rest of them though are treated like dirt. I find it shameful that films like this are taken seriously. The only interesting thing about them is that in fifteen years time, when everyone realises that the whole 'war' was about America creating a military base in the Middle East, these films will be looked back on as total propaganda. Nothing more.

It doesn't surprise me that I didn't like this, since when everyone wet themselves over The Hurt Locker, I was one of the few that stood up and shouted as loud as I could that it was a piece of shit. Only one film so far has managed to convince me that it was worthy of being made about this subject, and that was Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha. That at least made the effort to humanize the Iraqi people, after all if some nation trundled into your country tomorrow, what would you do? Anyway this isn't worth wasting almost two hours of your life on. Go listen to some early 70's Miles Davis instead, you'll feel much better for it.