March 13, 2010 -- In a sense, “Green Zone” is a movie which goes to great pains to point out the obvious: There were no weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq in 2003. That nation posed no threat to the U.S. For the U.S., the Iraq War was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. We knew that, or 80 percent of Americans did. Since the real truth about how the information was juiced to make Iraq look like a real threat is too complex to form the basis for an action movie like this, the screenplay was simplified so that one lone man was responsible for the U.S. declaring war on Iraq. Now that's dumb, but then, most conspiracy theories are. Conspiracy theories are simple explanations for complex problems formulated to lay all the blame on people you don't like. We all share the blame for the Iraq war whether we want to admit it or not.

The hero of our story is Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon of the Bourne series of movies), a 1990 Gulf War vet who is back in Iraq in 2003 leading MET D (Mobile Exploitation Team Delta) in a hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction. MET D's task is to find and evacuate a long list of reputed WMD sites. Although President Bush has declared the war over, Iraq is still a dangerous place. Miller's team is coming under sniper fire, small weapons fire and the occasional RPG attack. Men are being killed in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, and there is nothing to show for it. The maps showing the places the WMDs are supposed to be hidden are clearly bogus. When Miller points out to his superiors that he is on a deadly snipe hunt, they tell him to shut up and keep going.

While MET D is busy digging holes in a Baghdad neighborhood, a local man who speaks English, Freddy (Khalid Abdalla of “United 93”) approaches the Americans with vital information. He has just spotted a group of high-ranking Iraqi military officials meeting a short distance away. Freddy tells the Americans they are wasting their time digging holes in a place where all the locals know nothing of value is buried. If they want some valuable military targets, they should follow him. Miller takes a chance and follows Freddie. One of Miller's men asks him how he knows Freddie isn't leading them all into a trap. Miller replies, “We don't. Now man up.” That's the kind of take-charge guy Miller is.

During the ensuing raid, Miller's unit captures some Iraqis who have information which can lead them to high ranking fugitive Iraqi General Al Rawi (Yigal Naor), but the captives are taken from them by force from a higher-ranking team of mercenaries under the command of Clark Poundstone (played by Greg Kinnear of “Little Miss Sunshine”). Poundstone is a Defense Intelligence agent who also after Al Rawi. CIA station chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) makes contact with Miller and promises to help him get to the bottom of the bad intelligence on the WMDs. It seems that Al Rawi is the key to the whole Iraq puzzle. Whoever can get to him first can control the course of the war. Miller, Freddie, Brown and Poundstone and a few squads of soldiers end up chasing each other around the mean streets of Baghdad for the rest of the film. The film also addresses the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi Army, which later formed the heart of the insurgency. Unfortunately, this too, is tied to the same dumb conspiracy theory.

This is basically an action film. It is cut fast and shot mainly with hand-held cameras. It recreates the chaotic conditions in Baghdad at that time in history. It is very fast-paced. Director Paul Greengrass (the Bourne series of movies) is an expert when it comes to directing action films. He is an excellent director. The actors in this film are also top notch and they give good performances. The problem is with the screenplay. It is based on a dumb conspiracy theory about how the war was started. Granted, this conspiracy theory isn't as dumb as the ones believed by the so-called “9/11 truthers,” but it is still stupid.

The fact is, if the government needed WMDs justify the war, and was capable of such treachery, it could have easily planted some WMDs, like some enriched uranium, out in the Iraqi desert. Finding these planted nuclear materials, chemical weapons, or biological agents, or whatever was planted there, would provide the perfect justification for the war. That would be far easier to do than any of these elaborate conspiracy theories and far more convincing. The absurdity of these conspiracy theories reminds me of a quotation attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” In addition to the simplistic conspiracy, the plot uses elaborate trickery at the end to dispose of some of the bad guys without their blood getting on the hands of the hero. The hero doesn't get to stop the insurgency, but he does get a small victory of a sort. The screenplay thus rewrites history, but in a small way, not in a huge way, like “Inglourious Basterds” did.

In this film one man was able to start the war by not only manufacturing the evidence of WMDs, but at the same time feeding this information to the media (represented in this film by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Lawrie Dayne, played by Amy Ryan of “Gone Baby Gone”). He probably had help from higher up in the government, but essentially, one guy did it all. That is dumb. If you want a much smarter, more entertaining, funny version of how the Iraq War started (not more accurate, mind you, but infinitely more clever) see “In the Loop” one of last year's hidden film treasures. One of the things wrong with movies today is that a simplistic film like “Green Zone” gets major stars, big distribution and a huge advertising budget to promote it, while a smart little gem like “In the Loop” gets very little studio support at all. “In the Loop” is subtle, complex and satirical, not the stuff of which box office success is made. The great playwright George S. Kauffman said long ago “Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” and it is still true. “Green Zone” is simple and action-oriented. It may be the only way to get this particular message out to a mass audience. This film rates a C. If you want to just turn off your brain and enjoy the action, it is more like a C+.

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