Green Zone (2010)
Directed by Paul Greengrass
During the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and his team of Army inspectors are dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that threatens to invert the purpose of their mission.
4 connections found
View:
4 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Green Zone to
This is his third thriller taken from a real situation, after Bloody Sunday and United 93 , though unlike those two films, the factuality of Captain Phillips isn't really emphasised; hell, even the fictional Green Zone , his last film, feels more nakedly tethered to real life than this story, which is above all else a taut battle of wills, more a chess game than an action thriller, in which two men with wildly different skill sets and assumptions about how the world works try to outwit one another.
The film is superbly helmed with energy, intelligence and creative attention to detail in docudrama style by the talented Brit filmmaker Paul Greengrass ("Bourne Ultimatum"/"Bloody Sunday"/"Green Zone"), who bases the film upon the memoir "A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea" by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty.
With his two post-9/11 films ( “United 93” and “Green Zone” ), he traversed the turf of documentaries with action-flick vigor.
He previously helmed “United 93,” “Green Zone” and two Jason Bourne movies.
(His Iraq war film, Green Zone, came too close to taking a side but pretended to walk a straight, apolitical line.
Neopolitical thrillers are Greengrass’ stock in trade, but his disappointing previous film Green Zone was a more plot-driven and less visceral take on the same sort of material.
Director Greengrass is a master at combining sympathetic character studies with docudrama, staccato action sequences in films ranging from his Matt Damon “Bourne” trilogy to nonfiction-based films such as “Green Zone” and “United 93” and the aforementioned “Captain Phillips,” and he’s at the top of his game here in this expertly crafted adaptation of the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles.
Since his breakthrough film Bloody Sunday (2002), which dramatized the 1972 massacre of Irish civil rights protestors, Greengrass has made films about the 9/11 hijacking of an airliner in United 93 (2006), the U.S. invasion of Iraq in Green Zone (2010), the 2009 hijacking of a U.S. cargo ship by Somali pirates in Captain Phillips (2013), and, most recently, the 2011 massacre in Norway by a far-right extremist in 22 July (2018).
After sending audiences scrambling for barf bags to combat the motion sickness caused his 2010 Matt Damon-starring, Iraq War thriller Green Zone , the writer/director lulls viewers to sleep with his improbably dull adaptation of Paulette Jiles’ acclaimed 2016 novel.
Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss , Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah and Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone asked searching questions about the human costs of America’s post-9/11 interventions—questions that echoed through near-empty theaters.
…think Gravity via Green Zone , add gore and bring earplugs.