I just watched Green Zone, the new film by Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon. Im not a huge fan of the Bourne films, I don't mind them but I don't love them, nevertheless I was actually quite exited about Green Zone. Lately I've watched quite a few films about the Iraq war and western involvement in the Middle East; Syriana, Body of Lies, The Hurt Locker and In the loop stand out. I thought Green Zone would be a good addition to this growing collection of films, particularly because its based on a great non fiction book: Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Ultimately the film is not a bad one, but it fails to deliver when one considers the source of inspiration.
The book is a thorough work of investigative journalism which explores many facets of what happened after the Americans rode into Iraq. The focus is on the CPA (Coalition provisional Authority) and how in their isolation inside the green zone, a bubble of american culture inside Baghdad, they manage to make worse and worse decisions about the rebuilding of Iraq as a liberal democracy. It shows just how utterly incompetent and out of touch with the world the people in charge where starting with Bush and continuing all the way down the ladder. It also shows how incompetence was perpetuated because the Bush administration valued loyalty over competence, instead of sending Middle East experts who spoke arabic they would send republicans that hanged portraits of W. in their offices, who in turn chose young and inexperienced assistants who would not question their judgement.
As a work of journalism it is not obvious how one could go about doing a movie about it. Had I been given the task I would have tried to tell a story about a reasonable guy that has to deal with the absurdities of the american occupation in Iraq as he tries to do some good in the country. It would probably be some guy that speaks arabic and is in touch with the locals, it could even be an educated Iraqi who is delighted by the prospect of democracy and freedom in his country and that tries to help the Americans do the right decisions only to be faced by ignorant idealists who have no idea of what they are doing but are nonetheless convinced that they are right. In this way the film could have been either a political satire (In the Loop) or a genuine drama (Syriana), or even better a mix of both. This I think would have been very much in tune with the book, many of the real stories within the book could be translated into the big screen. For example they could have shown the absurd plans of many CPA staffers who instead of focusing on providing enough power and drinking water thought about introducing plastic surgery for children suffering from facial deformities, no doubt a noble cause, but rather irrelevant when you consider that children may not be having enough to eat or may be being downright killed by insurgents.
Of course I knew that the film would be nothing like this, this is the director and actor of the Bourne trilogy we are talking about. I knew it would an action thriller with fancy camera work and action scenes choreographed to be more realistic that reality itself. Yet I still thought that the film would have some resemblance to the book it claims to be inspired from, this is not the case. I don't even know why the film is called Green Zone because we don't actually see that much of it. Most of the film takes place outside the Green Zone and not much time is given to seeing the excess and decadence that reigned there. All we get is a scene where you see a swimming pool and all the staffer drinking beer with a mentioned of KFC and dominoes pizza. I can understand why you would want to make an action thriller, but I can't understand why they would call it Green Zone and not delve into what the Green Zone was about for more than a minute of two.
The thing is the film is not bad, I enjoyed the plot about finding the truth about the weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence that justified the war, all of which was a lie. I do have to say that the way they treat it is a bit ludicrous, many suspected that there were no WMD even before war was declared, the film makes it look as though its a big shock, which it really wasn't.
Had the film not been "inspired" by Imperial Life in the Emerald City I may have been impressed. It major success is the depiction of the Iraqi baathist general, and the how the Americans dealt with the army. Its a morally ambiguous film, which is always a good thing. It also doesn't commit the sin of excessive action sequences which is so common now a days. The problem is that because a film has already been made about the book I doubt that they will ever make one that could really do it justice. Then again they will certainly make many films about Iraq in the future, once it becomes less controversial, and no doubt many will be influenced by this great work of journalism.
With this I depart, for whomever reads this and has somehow managed to carry on until the end; I thank you and hope you managed to get something out of it. at least buy the book and read it. It really is quite illuminating, I never suspected how incompetent those that have power can be, at least not the Americans. I thought that the American government would be efficient but malicious, hence the Iraq war. what this book has shown me is that the Bush administration was a mess and that most of its players where incompetent and deluded. I now remember a passage from the book. The author reports on some pamphlets or graffiti that were around the green zone that said something like "President Bush, Haw Rah is NOT a foreign policy" to me that pretty much sums up what the Bush administration did in the middle east, haw rah!
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