Green Zone

Editorial

What's impressive is how Greengrass and his team have recreated Baghdad circa 2003. Saddam's lush palaces contrast with bombed-out apartment buildings as surely as Coalition elites hanging out at a Green Zone pool jars with wider-Baghdad streets choked with Iraqis desperate for water.

This era — of Dubya's premature ejaculation "Mission Accomplished", of billions of dollars in cash casually doled out to shady contractors and civilians, of gormless reporters swallowing whole the WMD story — already seems surreal. Greengrass and writer Brian Helgeland do well to incorporate such detail as they remind us that it's this same hubris and ignorance that will soon lead to the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the insurgency.

What we don't get is any sense of the Chief's history; he is, and remains, as much of a mystery as Bourne was when he came floating into our lives. Same goes for Brendan Gleeson and Greg Kinnear's at-loggerheads CIA spook and Defense Department huckster. Amy Ryan's journalist, meanwhile, functions merely as a symbol of how dysfunctional the American media became in the lead-up to the war.

But as Green Zone brings its combat, chase and conspiracy thrills, it's also a potent if blunt reminder of the criminal stupidity and duplicity that started a war whose civilian death toll alone is now in the vicinity of 100,000.

Michael Adams