Green Zone

When I compare it to American Sniper and Lone Survivor, Green Zone comes out pretty bland. I like Matt Damon, but he couldn't save the film in my eyes. The action is rather sparse and uninteresting, the finale in the dark rather annoyed me, and overall it tends to deal with political and other uninteresting stuff for me. Unfortunately I didn't have much fun, but the technical side was decent. 60% (17/06/2015)

The film consists of very disturbing moral implications of the war in Iraq on the basis of a rather interesting thriller, which takes advantage of all the qualities from Greengrass's tested abilities to set a hard pace. The wooden acting of Damon is just the tip of the iceberg of missed opportunities and issues that could and should have gone much deeper - to his detriment, Greengrass tried to find a gap between the non-participation and rawness of United 93 and Jason Bourne. Green Zone is not nearly as impressive as the former and not nearly as fun as the latter. It’s simply...green. (15/06/2010)

Technically speaking, it’s a flawless political-military thriller (not combat action), but to me it’s the weakest viewer experience that I’ve ever had with Greengrass. I get what Green Zone probably wants to say, but I believe they could have got more out of the premise. Given the level of the game the creators are playing, I can’t say the script is good enough – the deus ex machina character of Freddy is especially awful. But I’m not disappointed, because the genre (which I’m not a big fan of) didn’t lead me to expect much. (10/06/2010)

A politically engaged Bourne in Iraq? I’d like to use a line from the movie “don’t be naive", but that wouldn’t be altogether true. As a comparison it rather fits. A lot. A shame about the last third of the movie, however, when it turns off the hitherto path of the story down over-simplified and naively presented political agitation, aimed in the right direction, but the delivery... (especially the last dialog between Miller and Poundstone is just beyond the pale; I would never have expected anything like that from Greengrass). P.S.: Although I understand that a book in newspaper article form which is a bureaucratic odyssey where the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, or: “How the Yanks failed to understand that an Arab land after years of tyranny, sanctions and war is not the same as any State of the Union following a natural disaster" is darn hard to turn into a non-documentary movie, but why on earth make a movie about weapons of mass destruction or botched attempts at finding them if there is no mention of either in the book? (27/05/2010)

It would not be dignified to compare this movie to the Jason Bourne series. Let’s overlook the fact that Green Zone does not have Bourne’s entertaining drive, has no compelling music, and takes place from beginning to end in a location that looks like a single dark construction site and tells us nothing about its characters. It is easier to compare it with Ridley Scott’s thematically related Body of Lies, which I rated with three stars and which entertained me more. Green Zone is just a black-and-white militaristic exercise with a directing style that has been applied more successfully and with more vivid colors in other movies. (11/06/2010)