"All they're interested in is something they can hold up on CNN."
"Civil war in six months, I guarantee it."
"Your government wanted to hear the lie."
"It is not for you to decide what happens here."
Place all that between "shock and awe" and "mission accomplished" and it sizes up the war in Iraq pretty nicely, doesn't it?
Director Paul Greengrass' film about how things went so wrong in so many ways. Working from Brian Helgeland's script ("inspired by" Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City"), Greengrass uses his trademark hand-held camera style (and that's a hand with a serious shake) to create what may be a new genre: the historical non-stop action drama.
Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, whose unit is charged with finding WMD. When a third consecutive "confirmed" site turns up empty - it's a defunct toilet factory - he begins to realize that this isn't just coincidence. It's not simply a matter of frustration; men are fighting and dying trying to secure these sites, so that Miller's team can investigate. Greengrass, as expected, is expert at capturing the confusion amidst the violence of these fights, the hand-held style fitting in with the general chaos.
It's certainly interesting to see what's been reported on the manipulation of information played out as drama, and the acting is uniformly good. To pretend that the film doesn't make a political statement is silly. Of course it does. It wouldn't be effective at all if it didn't.
"Civil war in six months, I guarantee it."
"Your government wanted to hear the lie."
"It is not for you to decide what happens here."
Place all that between "shock and awe" and "mission accomplished" and it sizes up the war in Iraq pretty nicely, doesn't it?
Director Paul Greengrass' film about how things went so wrong in so many ways. Working from Brian Helgeland's script ("inspired by" Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City"), Greengrass uses his trademark hand-held camera style (and that's a hand with a serious shake) to create what may be a new genre: the historical non-stop action drama.
Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, whose unit is charged with finding WMD. When a third consecutive "confirmed" site turns up empty - it's a defunct toilet factory - he begins to realize that this isn't just coincidence. It's not simply a matter of frustration; men are fighting and dying trying to secure these sites, so that Miller's team can investigate. Greengrass, as expected, is expert at capturing the confusion amidst the violence of these fights, the hand-held style fitting in with the general chaos.
It's certainly interesting to see what's been reported on the manipulation of information played out as drama, and the acting is uniformly good. To pretend that the film doesn't make a political statement is silly. Of course it does. It wouldn't be effective at all if it didn't.