Review: "Green Zone"

This is probably the first and only time I'll ever see a movie before my good friend and self-made film critic Devon Holbrook of Rushmore Movies fame, so I want to take advantage of it.

Green Zone, a not-so-subtle dig at the policies of the George W. Bush administration, exposes some of the untruths of the early days of the Iraq war -- specifically, the lack of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) operations.

Matt Damon (Dogma, The Bourne _____) stars as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, tasked with locating and securing WMD storage zones. Not surprisingly, he becomes disenchanted when three consecutive sites prove to be duds and his unit suffers unnecessary casualties.

But in the military, there is such a thing as a stupid question. So Clark Poundstone, a Washington spin doctor played by Greg Kinnear (Stuck on You, Little Miss Sunshine), forces Miller to take the investigation into his own hands. With the help of CIA provocateur Martin Brown, Miller learns the source of the faulty intelligence. And in a fairytale ending, he briefs the top international news outlets on what really happened. Miller's report suddenly and dramatically changed public opinion on the war and caused Bush to admit his lies, and the public ousted Bush from office in the 2004 election.

Except it didn't, and he didn't, and we didn't. It's still a movie, after all. Green Zone is a provocative look at the state of our military and the internal power struggles between front-line soldiers, Washington bureaucrats and less-than-intrepid journalists. (Please, don't assume that all journalists are as stupid as Lawrie Dayne, the reporter in the movie who broke the WMD story without verifying her sources.)

Rating: 4/5
Description: Part war movie, part who-dunnit, part expose` on Washington, Green Zone questions whether our government wants us to know, or simply to believe.

*Note: I know a journalist who worked in the Green Zone at the palace who avoided being blown up by a matter of seconds. His friend, whom he'd stopped to talk with while she was sunning herself by the pool, wasn't so lucky. There's no safe place in a time of war.