The Last Movie I Saw

I understand that Matt Damon knew and respected Howard Zinn. The historian's effect on the actor seems apparent in the roles he chooses to play, including his latest, Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass (himself no stranger to politically-themed work). The movie chronicles the growing disillusion of a soldier tasked with finding WMDs in the early weeks following the invasion of Iraq. As the intelligence governing his missions (identifying places where the weapons are supposed to be hidden) is proven faulty over and over again, he begins to question why he and his men are being put in harm's way for pretty much no tangible benefit. It's a good question, and it would have been nice if it was asked more often six or seven years ago. Setting aside that point, the film is still pretty good, though Greengrass has apparently gone off the deep end with the shaky hand-held cameras used to generate disorientation and tension. Gtranted, he's more effective with this technique than a lot of his contemporaries (as the poster above notes, he directed a couple of the Bourne films, also with Damon, in which this style was prevalent). Used sparingly, this can provide some nice, dramatic visual punctuation; but used as a constant visual theme, it's both tiring and counterproductive when ideas are supposedly as critical as action to moving the plot forward (which I would have thought was the point in this case). Given all the accolades heaped on the largely apolitical The Hurt Locker, I'm a little surprised that this film seems to not be garnering more attention or praise, since it does have more intellectual substance on a topic of continuing national importance. I'd hate to think that Americans don't really want to think about the wars as anything more than an opportunity to flex our muscles overseas, but maybe that was exactly the point of the whole exercise. Randolph Bourne-- who I suspect had as much influence on Zinn as Zinn had on Damon-- said it way back in the days of World War I: "war is the health of the state." Part of his thesis was that war relieved citizens of the impulse to question their leaders, since everyone had to pull together for the good of the country. Green Zone posits an alternate possibility, but in the end buries it in action-thriller cliches that render that possibility pretty much moot.