Green Zone

Welcome, class, to the latest in a series of lectures in the course "Modern
History For Short Attention Spans" by Professor Matt Damon. If you recall, last
month, Professor Damon presented his thesis on the fall of apartheid with the
assistance of Dr Morgan Freeman. This month, Prof Damon enlightens us on the
causes of the second Iraq War.

Matt Damon plays a US Army specialist whose role in Iraq is to hunt for and
secure weapons of mass destruction. And thus is getting a bit pissed off with
what turns out to be a constant round of seeing guys get shot whilst securing a
disused toilet factory or digging holes in the middle of the road. He expresses
his displeasure to the top brass, who basically all say "Shush."

CIA bloke Brendan Fraser chips in at this point, because he too is beginning to
believe that the whole WMD thing is a load of bullshit, and between them they
begin poking their noses where they're not wanted. Eventually, this turns into
a big race between Matt Damon trying to arrest a high ranking Iraqi general who
knows what happened, and some special forces dudes with orders to kill the guy.
All at the behest of Pentagon guy Greg Kinnear, who we know is dodgy as all
hell, because he has wire rimmed glasses.

Overall, it's a sort of based-in-fact thing. I doubt anything in the movie is
actually true (without having checked) but the overall message is clear and
something we can all get behind - proof of WMDs was manufactured in order to
gain a reason to go to war, where the real objective was the removal of Saddam
and replacing him with a nice friendly tame democratic regime. So, while I
doubt that the kids in 2050 are going to get shown this film in history lessons
the way they kept forcing us to watch Gandhi when I was a lad, it is a handy
picturebook style explanation for the general audience of how shitty the Bush
regime was. As an action film, it kind of rattles along in an exciting enough
fashion without really engaging you that much. Overall, the fact is somewhat
compromised by the needs of action cinema, and the action is somewhat
compromised by the needs of historical fact.