Green Zone

Directed by Paul Greengrass

(R)

**

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Green Zone is a “strangely dated, foolishly grandiose, simplistically angry” wartime thriller, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Paul Greengrass’ film about how “one patriot blows the lid off America’s missteps in Iraq” stars Matt Damon as a warrant officer in 2003 who questions military intelligence after his searches for weapons of mass destruction come up empty. The director wishes we could all go back to the days before Iraq descended into sectarian warfare, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. But Green Zone seems less like an analysis of what happened than an “angry fist” shaken at George W. Bush for leading the country into war. Greengrass’ suggestion that one soldier might have possibly changed the course of the war is “cinematic wish-fulfillment, an insult both to the intelligence of viewers and to the troops.” Because it ignores the situation’s complexity, Green Zone’s worldview is as skewed as the Bush administration’s, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. And, like the war’s planners, the film “seeks to encase Iraq in a narrative far too naïve and restrictive for any nation to bear.”