by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright March 2010
Ugly in the first half, long in the second half, nonsense in the end.
I went to see Green Zone to see if I could answer a real-life mystery: Why movie makers were complaining that people wouldn't buy tickets to their movies about the current wars.
The answer I came out with: This one, at least, was not interesting.
The basic premise of this story is that an ordinary soldier, a warrant officer, is tasked with looking for WMD's -- weapons of mass destruction. This is the first days of the war, and things are quite optimistic, but chaotic. The first part of the movie attempts to show this chaos, but does only a so-so job in my opinion.
Our soldier protagonist is not finding any WMD's, even though his superiors are telling him the locations he is searching are based on rock-solid intelligence. This he finds more disturbing than his superiors, and when he takes action on this uneasiness we depart into movie-storyland. An English-speaking man-on-the-street Iraqi Joe tells our man he's seen a mysterious meeting not from from where his current futile search is taking place. Our man takes his own initiative and heads off, and for the rest of the movie finds himself in a fairly classic swirl of intrigue... which is the weakness of the movie: it's the same old story wearing Iraqi War clothes this time.
Some Technofiction flaws:
o In the first scene we have mobs of looters heading in and out of a compound, and a sniper taking pot-shots over the heads of this crowd. Umm... these looters must have a lot of faith in that sniper, and the Americans shooting back at him.
o When our man catches some bad guys, the stereotypical mysterious special forces types show up out of nowhere within minutes of the capture and muscle in forcibly to take the goodies. Whoa! How did they find out something interesting was happening so quickly? Who authorized them? Who should have confirmed to our man this transfer was OK? These are never answered.
o Our man starts associating with intrigue types, but his relation with them is never clear. Who does he report to? What's his chain of command? What does his CO have to say about these people? These are things every seasoned military type wants to have very clear. Even in war time, CYA (Cover Your Ass) is still important. All the more so because our man is a warrant officer, not a full officer. A warrant officer is the Army's designation for an important geek type -- they are more valuable than sergents, but not command figures like full officers are. In Vietnam, where I saw duty, many helicopter pilots were warrant officers. A person of this level can be hung out to dry very easily.
o The worst flaw was the dénouement. We discover that the important Iraqi general we've been chasing around had a secret meeting with the sleezy US government-type to tell him... there are no weapons of mass descruction! <gasp!> ...wait ...Isn't that what the Iraqi government publicly said for ten years before this? Isn't that what Hans Blix and his team kept discovering during three years of searching? This took a secret meeting to reveal? I sure did some head scratching when this was the dénouement.
o The final chase scene was tiresome. The mix of technology, equipment, environment and chasers didn't make any sense, so for me, it went on and on for no reason.
o The reveal-all at the end didn't make any sense either. What exactly did our man send to this arm-long list of media people? (not to menton, where did he get that list on such short notice?) He's a warrant officer! What's his authority that the media people will respect? What's to keep his story from being considered just another nut-case story from a guy wearing a tin-foil hat?
Conclusion
Each war is distinctive; each war movie is not. This seems to be the heart of the problem with contemporary war movies. The stories contemporary film makers are comfortable telling are well-suited for heroic wars with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. Wars that are messy about that are either not filmed, or transformed into good guy/bad guy stories, which makes them look odd to people who are even a little familiar with the real life story. That was what happened to me as I watched Green Zone.
I came, I watched, I wondered what I was looking at.
-- The End --