Green Zone

Paul Greengrass is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. He is one of those very rare directors that can straddle the line between populist entertainment and political film making. With past efforts, he tended to lean more heavily on one aspect while infusing it with the other. The Bourne films were entertaining while being moderately political, United 93 and Bloody Sunday were political while being moderately populist. With Green Zone, he blurs the line more than before. Here he tries to make a film that is both very political, and pure entertainment. The results aren't quite perfect, but they are an interesting step forward for a man who seems on the cusp of being one of the most important directors of his generation.

Green Zone is a fictional spin on the way we got into the Iraq War. One might initially assume he is going for a purely political film here, but that notion is very quickly brushed aside. From the beginning, this thing is an action picture. The film opens with an explosion (many of them, actually), and ramps up the tension from there. Matt Damon stars as Miller, a soldier who has been assigned the duty of finding the elusive weapons of mass destruction. After coming up empty handed again and again, he starts to suspect that the Intel he is being given is fictitious. He sets out to find the source of the information, with the help of a local man named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla, who also appeared in United 93). Jumping from location to location, never sure who he can trust, Miller is racing against time to find what he needs to know before things get out of control in Iraq.

What Greengrass appears to have done is make a modern version of All the Presidents Men, and turn it into an action film. Miller jumps from lead to lead, clue to clue, trying to uncover a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of government. Where some might take umbrage is with the fact that this is a fictional account on a real story. None of these people actually exist, nor was there ever any conspiracy uncovered. For those who don't take kindly to speculative historical fiction, this might come across as smug finger pointing. For those who can enjoy that sort of thing, Greengrass infuses it with many great details and ideas. Personally, I don't think there was a grand conspiracy, but the film does give ample evidence to support the idea that information could have been knowingly falsified to get us to war. And at its heart, Green Zone isn't about the specific details, as much as it is about the bigger questions of why we go to war, and what ultimately justifies it.

It can't be left unmentioned that Greengrass brings his traditional documentary style camerawork to the film. I personally have no problems with this style, as it lends itself to creating a level of intimacy that more conventional camerawork doesn't. At the same time, though, I think he overindulged. There are a great many scenes where it is almost impossible to see what is going on, especially early on. Some shots go out of focus, others miss what is happening entirely. It can be frustrating. On the other hand, it helps the audience get into the mind of these soldiers who were the first to arrive in Iraq. They too are lost and confused, and the camera is a great facsimile of how overwhelming the experience for them was those first few days of war.

The film's one big flaw, sadly, is the characters. The style of film Greengrass usually makes requires a bit of detachment from the characters, much like you would have in an objective documentary. Here, though, it stops being detachment, and starts being stock characters. Everybody is a character type, not a character. As such, they are only vessels for exposition. I have not mentioned the fact that the film also starts such great actors as Amy Ryan, Greg Kinnear, and Brenden Gleason. That's because none leave any impact on the viewer. Even Damon as Miller is a bit of a nothing character. His righteousness never feels backed up by anything, and when he gets his big moment at the end where he claims that the reasons for going to war always matter, it feels less like a character and more like a screenwriter saying it. But there is one shining performance, that of the aforementioned Freddy (Khalid Abdalla). He is the heart of the film, and you actually care what happens with his story more than anyone else. Part of that is the film playing on our fears that this Iraqi trying to help the government will get screwed for doing the right thing, but most of it comes from a strong performance on Abdalla's part.

While it doesn't achieve the same levels of greatness that his best political (United 93) or pulp (The Bourne Ultimatum) films did, Green Zone is still an interesting step forward in his attempt to fully fuse the two types of films. Had a bit more work been given to the screenplay and characters, it might have been to that level. It's interesting to see that in the last year, Hollywood has finally started to figure out how to tell Iraq War stories. While this isn't quite up there with The Hurt Locker, it is certainly an entertaining alternative. Let's hope Hollywood continues to find new and interesting ways to mine this material.

The Bourne Ultimatum

When I first watched The Bourne Identity five years ago, I found it to be a passably fun time, but pretty forgettable. I had no real interest in a sequel and skipped The Bourne Supremacy when it was released. Yet I kept hearing from people who felt the same way as I did about Identity that Supremacy was far and away better than the first. One evening I stumbled across Supremacy on TV and ended up watching it. I was astonished. This was how to make a sequel, I thought. This was Aliens. This was T2. This was Wrath of Khan. A large part of this had to do with the new director to the series, Paul Greengrass. Greengrass understood why so many sequels are awful, and why only a few succeed. A sequel has to be more than just another adventure with the same characters, but a deepening of an audience's understanding of those characters and the world they inhabit. Like Supremacy before it, The Bourne Ultimatum is able to build on what we've seen so far to create a more than satisfying conclusion to an increasingly impressive trilogy.

Ultimatum does something I don't think I've seen a sequel outside of Back to the Future Part II do: it doubles back onto the previous installment, telling us what happened between the final action scene in Moscow and the epilogue in New York. As such, this doesn't feel like a new movie as much as a direct continuation of the last film. If you were to cut off the epilogue and credits on Supremacy and just insert this movie where they were, you'd never even notice that they were two different movies. This means that if you aren't totally up to speed on the last film, you'll be instantly lost. For some this might be a detriment, but to me it's a big plus. Greengrass and Co. assume you are an intelligent viewer who doesn't need everything spoonfed to you, and it makes for a much more fulfilling experience.

The basic premise should be familiar by now. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is an amnesiac hitman trying to find out who exactly he is. At the same time he is trying to evade people who want him dead before he remembers something that might ruin them. Unlike too many franchises, the Bourne trilogy makes a point of not just bringing back all characters who survived previous installments, but showing how their presence in the sequel is significant to Bourne's journey. Everyone has a connection to Bourne's story, and characters who played small parts in the first two installments prove to have a bigger overall role when everything is finally revealed. Take, for example, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles). She seemed so insignificant in the past, yet she kept popping up. This time around we begin to realize that she has a direct connection to Bourne's past that he no longer remembers. Also back is Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), a CIA head who realizes that Bourne may not be the villain that her bosses make him out to be. She has proven to be a strong element to this series, and she keeps the scenes not focusing on Bourne interesting and gripping.

If the film suffers, it's with the new cast members. Great actors all around, but none quite fill the void left by people like Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. David Strathairn is the direct descendant of the characters played by Cooper and Cox, but he is never as intense or menacing as his predecessors. Adding a bit of needed gravitas to the villainous side, but with far too little screen time, is Albert Finney, playing a mysterious man who may hold the answers to Bourne's past. Strangely enough, I think that had the two actors switched roles, it would have worked even better. Finney can play menacing much better than Strathairn, while Strathairn can play mysterious with the best of them. Yet this is a minor quibble: both get the job done, and neither is the reason we're watching the movie in the first place.

The action here is the best of the series. Whether it be a cat and mouse game in a train station, or a car chase through New York, Greengrass stages set pieces that leave you breathless. Many people have complained about his shakycam style, and to a degree I understand that complaint. Yet at the same time, it pulls you in so much more because of how real everything feels. The fight scenes, the car crashes: they all feel more impactful, more intense. Sure, on occasion it becomes difficult to tell what is happening, but by and large, things are easy to watch and understand.

What elevates The Bourne Ultimatum above other action films is that it's actually about something. Imagine waking up one day and learning that you used to kill people, some of whom may not have deserved to die. How do you deal with that? The whole trilogy has dealt with that in some fashion, but here it is front and center. Bourne must struggle with the fact that he was once no different from the people being sent to kill him, and that had he not been struck with amnesia, he'd probably be in their shoes trying to kill someone like him. It's an adrenaline fueled morality tale.

I don't know that on its own The Bourne Ultimatum is a four-star film. Yet as a conclusion to a trilogy, it most definitely is. I doubt anyone would watch this as a stand-alone film, so I think the four-star rating is deserved. Few, if any, trilogies raise the bar with each installment, and none really come together as tightly as this one has. Everything falls into place by the end, and this has proven to be a journey I am glad I took part in. There are still a few threads left unfinished, and the possibility of a fourth film is certainly there, but I suspect that this will be the end to the series. Then again, Greengrass has proven he knows how to raise the bar each time, so maybe a fourth one could be a worthwhile experience one day.