I watched the Green Zone last night and was very pleasantly surprised. It's the best war movie set in Iraq so far in my opinion. I really enjoyed the Hurt Locker as well. It was suspenseful, had some great action and I cared about the characters. In fact that movie was going along brilliantly until
SPOILER...
the main guy headed back to the US, got bored with the mundane life of suburbia in 15 seconds of movie time and then valiantly decided to return to Iraq for another tour so that "he could save lives".
The script didn't get too complicated. There were bad Hajis and good Hajis and the US guys had to stop the bombs from blowing up the good Hajis and the US people.
The Green Zone on the other hand took on something more ambitious with the so called reason the war started in the first place - the now quite widely accepted as non-existent WMDs.
From a language point of view Green Zone had much more Arabic dialogue and much of it wasn't subtitled. There were a couple of Iraqi phrases I would like to listen to again on a rewatch and try to learn. One definite plus was that the movie actually shows the layout of Baghdad quite well - well as much as was necessary to convince me (keeping in mind I'm not someone who has been there before). Other movies show you a sand dune or a dusty street with some Arabic graffiti and you're meant to believe it's Baghdad. This movie actually showed aerial shots, named lots of locations and flew over the monument of the two swords touching and Saddam's palace and airport. At one point in the movie a couple of Iraqi guys were reading from a notebook and all the Arabic was in isolated form. Not sure why that was....... but I'm guessing it was because the prop guy didn't know how to write Arabic.. unless it was some kind of a code book.. Anyway..
The action was great and it was refreshing to have Matt Damon getting his butt kicked a lot more than he did as Jason Bourne. My only gripes was
Today I tried to find the novel the Green Zone is based on: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" here in Perth. No where in the city has it but they can order it. This pretty much sums up my free time in Perth these days - looking for anything Arabic in the media, eating at Lebanese restaurants, have a couple of Arabic classes and going to a Melkite Mass on a Sunday. It's safe to say I'm quite obsessed at this point but this realisation has got me wondering if instead of looking for small samples of these sorts of things and trying to fill up my life with them, perhaps instead I need to focus more on how to get back there and then the chasing, gathering, searching and obsessing will stop
SPOILER...
the main guy headed back to the US, got bored with the mundane life of suburbia in 15 seconds of movie time and then valiantly decided to return to Iraq for another tour so that "he could save lives".
The script didn't get too complicated. There were bad Hajis and good Hajis and the US guys had to stop the bombs from blowing up the good Hajis and the US people.
The Green Zone on the other hand took on something more ambitious with the so called reason the war started in the first place - the now quite widely accepted as non-existent WMDs.
From a language point of view Green Zone had much more Arabic dialogue and much of it wasn't subtitled. There were a couple of Iraqi phrases I would like to listen to again on a rewatch and try to learn. One definite plus was that the movie actually shows the layout of Baghdad quite well - well as much as was necessary to convince me (keeping in mind I'm not someone who has been there before). Other movies show you a sand dune or a dusty street with some Arabic graffiti and you're meant to believe it's Baghdad. This movie actually showed aerial shots, named lots of locations and flew over the monument of the two swords touching and Saddam's palace and airport. At one point in the movie a couple of Iraqi guys were reading from a notebook and all the Arabic was in isolated form. Not sure why that was....... but I'm guessing it was because the prop guy didn't know how to write Arabic.. unless it was some kind of a code book.. Anyway..
The action was great and it was refreshing to have Matt Damon getting his butt kicked a lot more than he did as Jason Bourne. My only gripes was
- the shaky hand-held camera - this is just dumb and was over done. We don't need that sort of thing to fabricate realism
- Some of the speeches were way too prophetic sounding with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
Today I tried to find the novel the Green Zone is based on: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" here in Perth. No where in the city has it but they can order it. This pretty much sums up my free time in Perth these days - looking for anything Arabic in the media, eating at Lebanese restaurants, have a couple of Arabic classes and going to a Melkite Mass on a Sunday. It's safe to say I'm quite obsessed at this point but this realisation has got me wondering if instead of looking for small samples of these sorts of things and trying to fill up my life with them, perhaps instead I need to focus more on how to get back there and then the chasing, gathering, searching and obsessing will stop
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