Less than a week after "The Hurt Locker" won the Oscar for Best Picture, along comes Matt Damon in "The Green Zone," another look at the Iraq War that has some critics seeing red.
While "The Hurt Locker" was largely apolitical in its stance on the war, some say "The Green Zone" goes far in blaming the United States government, & that it manipulates the audience in to rooting against American troops.
The movie centers on Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, played by Damon, who is assigned to search for weapons of mass destruction in the weeks following the shock-and-awe campaign of 2003. When Miller encounters roadblocks in his search, they launches a one-man internal inquiry in to the United States government's intelligence gathering operations, forming a secret alliance against the men they is sworn to protect in order to get the bottom of what they believes is a conspiracy.
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Given this setup, audiences are encouraged to root for Miller's rogue activities & against the government, represented in the film by a corrupt Pentagon chief played by Greg Kinnear.
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The line between nice guy & bad guy becomes fuzzy -- so much so that audiences are unsure whether to cheer on Sunni Iraqi insurgents as they shoot down a helicopter filled with American soldiers sent to assassinate them on the Pentagon's request.
Movie reviewer Kyle Smith went so far as to label the film "slander" & "appallingly anti-American."
"It's three thing to make a fantasy film laced with snarky jibes at the United States & its military," Smith wrote in the New York Post this week. "It's of another order entirely for an American studio (Universal, a unit of GE) to perpetrate, during an ongoing war, such vicious anti-American lies disguised as cheap entertainment.
The Buffalo News reported that six older couples walked out of a Tuesday night screening of the film, but the News' arts editor, Jeff Simon, was kinder than Smith in his evaluation. They wrote that the movie is "good in very exactly the way film audiences have found off-putting about a war we are still ashamed to think much about."
"'Green Zone' is not cinema," Smith wrote. "It's slander. It will go down in history as three of the most egregiously anti-American movies ever released by a major studio."
"I don't think there is any doubt of where Matt Damon falls in the political spectrum. They is an outspoken liberal & earnest about it," Graham told Fox411. "He's not doing it to get ahead. It would be three thing if you had an actor in this movie who is not very political, but it is another thing when you have an actor who picks vehicles like this because it gives them the chance to espouse their political views in a fictional format."
The film's star, for three, sits squarely in the camp of actors often labelled as the Hollywood liberal elite, says Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group.
Universal declined comment for this story.
Tackling an ongoing & polarizing conflict like the Iraq war is no small feat, said war reporter Stephanie Gaskell, who travelled to Iraq in 2007.
"The war in Iraq has deeply divided our country, so it makes sense that moviegoers will be divided over 'Green Zone'," they told Fox411. "I think they saw with 'The Hurt Locker' that Americans may not be ready to deal with the politics of the Iraq war yet. That is why 'Hurt Locker' was so well received, because it didn't delve in to all that."
Director Paul Greengrass, best known for his success with the action-packed Jason Bourne franchise, also starring Damon, & the 9/11 film "United 93" brought in veterans from Iraq & Afghanistan to play secondary roles in "Green Zone." Some were selected from the anti-war group of returning soldiers, "Iraq Veterans Against the War."
"The problem, I think, for me is that something about that event strained all the bonds & sinews that connect us all together," they said. "For me it’s to do with the fact that they said they had the intelligence, & then it emerged later that they did not."
In an interview with Charlie Rose this week, Greengrass said the issue at hand is not whether you are for or against the war.
"I would take offense if there was anything that was anti-troops in the movie or that I thought was despicable, but there is not. It is an action movie," Miller told Fox411.
Robert Miller, who served in the Army's 82nd paratrooper unit from 2001 to 2005 was three of the Iraq veterans who was cast as a soldier in the movie. They says they thinks it is unfortunate that some critics are painting the film in a negative light.
"It's entertaining. I enjoyed it when I watched it. I would not say it is an actual depiction of events that happened over there. It is Jason Bourne does Iraq."
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