The biggest major motion picture released this weekend in America (to relatively weak attendance) was the reunion of Bourne Identity filmmaker Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon for Green Zone , a fictional take on the beginning of the U.S led military invasion of Iraq almost exactly seven years ago (the anniversary takes place at the end of this week).
As Tom Carson in GQ wrote in his review of the film, the screenplay is packed with nearly every Iraq war "peccadillo" that occurred in the first few years there, with the possible exception of any Blackwater type unit creating havoc. Although it's said to be partially based on Washington Post reporter's Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, there are only a couple of scenes that seem to come directly from the environment depicted in that 2007 book.
There is one significant twist in the story that deviates from it's ripped from the headlines approach, and that's on the supposed raison d'etre for the war, the search for weapons of mass destruction.
As well know, all of the major intelligence agencies and other notable so called experts, as former weapons inspector David Kay said in 2004 to the Armed Services Committee, "were almost all wrong," in believing that there was WMD in Iraq.
But in Green Zone, Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland flip the scenario. In the film, a character whose code name is "Magellan" is supposedly the secret source who knows where the WMD's are, and is considered a vetted source (in real life the character was called "curveball").
In Green Zone, "Magellan" has told high ranking Pentagon officials that in fact there aren't any chemical or biological weapons to be found in Iraq, but that information is never filtered down to the president or the troops. And that's where we get a duped reporter (a la Judith Miller from the New York Times) who buys into the Pentagon's intel from Magellan, reporting on these great sources, though she later admits she never met "Magellan". The character played by Amy Ryan, is in the film a Wall Street Journal reporter.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2010.