Green Zone is a film with Paul Greengrass at the helm and Matt Damon as lead and thus is a classic example of guaranteeing a good time with big names without compromising or dumbing down. I knew little about it before, but these two persuaded me it was a good bet for the night. Its intelligence and action with a social conscious were all present - everything the last James Bond film failed to deliver with any coherence.
It does make you feel angry that though the leadership of Iraq were a throughly vile lot, they were no longer a significant threat to their population as though they are estimated to have killed 10,000 after 1991, the estimates of the organisation that calculates genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia believes that as a direct or indirect result of the invasion (from all the lawless anarachy that was prevalent) a million people died. An Iraqi child is now less likely to see their fifth birthday than before the 2003 incursion. Yet the war criminals in the West still stay in plush residence free to travel wherever they like. The movie also makes clear the senseless loss of life in the conflict. Inevitably, The Guardian is name-checked (with the Wall Street Journal taking a kicking).
We are also reminded of the lies that too many people were happy to swallow, including many useful idiots in the press, as they supported the war. An once the Americans were in occupation, the ones in the ascendancy within the Washington DC administration had not a clue, not a clue, about how to rebuild a country. But there were Americans who did understand what was needed, but they were ignored as they spoke the truth, something those who wanted the war were not interested by in general. Until competent people - Bob Gates and Dabid Petraeus - were belatedly appointed, the Iraq adventure was a disastrous farrago.
Within Green Zone, the denouement to the final action scene was utterly predictable in its bathetic conclusion. The maxim that a gun shown in the first act will be fired in the third act came to the fore. An evil shit of an American who took pleasure in torturing others took all the coincidental paths that led to his doom. Overall, however, despite us knowing the wider outcome, this is a taut and classy conspiracy theory thriller, the tension sustained right to the coda.