Short Take: Action-packed and smart, but perhaps too slanted

Director: Paul Greengrass (Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum)

Screenwriter: Brian Helgeland (Mystic River, L.A. Confidential)

Cast: Matt Damon (The Informant!, Bourne series), Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges), Greg Kinnear (Flash of Genius)

Length: 1h 55m

Synopsis: The setting is Baghdad, Iraq, 2003. U.S. Chief warrant officer Roy Miller (Damon) is directly involved with the American takeover of Iraq by leading squads of men into hostile sites where weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are suspected of being kept and/or manufactured. After coming up short several times in a row, Miller begins to seriously question the intelligence that he and his men are receiving. Instructed to basically shut up and do his job, he instead takes advantage of when an Iraqi local offers him a tip about a meeting of high-ranking Iraq military officials by acting on the information first and relaying it later. Doing this gets him involved in a world of intelligence politics that he was not ready for, and that he may not be able to escape unharmed.

Analysis: To understand the parameters of the film it is perhaps important to know exactly what the book it’s based from is about. Said book is titled Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone and is authored by Rajiv Chandrasekaran who was the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. The book centers on presenting “the tenure of [Iraqi] presidential viceroy L. Paul Bremer between May 2003 and June 2004 as an all-too-avoidable disaster in which an occupational administration selected primarily for its loyalty to the Bush administration routinely ignored the reality of local conditions until, as one ex-staffer puts it, ‘everything blew up in our faces,’” (Publishers Weekly). Said local conditions were at the time when Saddam Hussein had been captured and the U.S. was trying to construct a democratic administration with political figures who the Iraq citizenship didn’t consider “of the people.” The Green Zone, as it is called, is the enclave of Baghdad where, centered in Hussein’s old palace, the U.S. government headquartered the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

The book goes into a lot of detail about the many missteps taken by the CPA and Bush administration, the primary example of which being the fact that no WMD were ever found on Iraq soil despite intelligence that led the U.S. to believing otherwise. The significance of this is of course that the supposed presence of WMD was the main reason for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. This is where the film’s story comes in, particularly with main protagonist Miller. As a character, Miller is supposed to symbolize the opposing viewpoint of the pro-occupation position. This is due to two things: the suspicion that he is being ordered to lead his men into hostile environments based off of poor and/or inaccurate intelligence, and the suspicion that there may in fact not be any WMD to find. The subsequent butting of heads between him and his superiors is not to be taken as an anti-U.S. stance, but merely a questioning of authority.

This questioning of authority is the catalyst for the whole film and thus serves as one of its overriding messages. Due to Miller’s insubordination he is able to put together various puzzle pieces that would have otherwise remained unbeknownst to him or out of his reach. Obviously, then, the film is arguing that questioning authority can lead to positive results. What’s peculiar about this message is that it uses a U.S. military combatant, which is not the usual type of person who is prone to questioning his superiors. Soldiers are vigorously trained to follow orders to the “T” regardless of personal beliefs or opinions. So, that such a person would be inclined in this instance to disobey orders and disregard proper procedure might indicate that there is an implicit message to be found. Two possible ways to interpret this are that the film is A) trying to emphasize the preposterousness and nonsensicality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq by showing that even those who are conditioned to obey authority without question cannot avoid doing so, and/or B) making a bold statement that such conditioning can prove to be counterproductive because it keeps supposedly obvious gaffes like the intelligence about Iraq’s armory from registering soon enough. Either interpretation clearly leans towards the political left, so it would be reasonable to suggest that the film as a whole does the same. However, much of the story’s criticisms, including its possible meanings attached to the main protagonist, appear to be based from hindsight (i.e. confirmed history), and there is enough fiction attached to these criticisms that one could argue the film’s entertainment aims are fixed towards political neutrality. But as neutral as the entertainment aims may be, a leftist undercurrent is all but undeniable if for no other reason than the film is based from a book that calls the U.S. occupation of Iraq a practice in imperialism. This aspect will no doubt deter some audiences while attracting others.

Rating: 7.5