Green Zone

2010 Suspense/Thriller movie from Paul Greengrass, the same director as The Bourne Series.

It is 2003, and the Iraq War has just begun. Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) has been running some missions trying to find Weapons of Mass Destruction, but for some reason every place his team hits comes up empty. When he raises concern over the quality of the intel he is getting regarding the WMD, his superiors dodge the question.

Miller then sets off to find out what is really going on regarding the weapons, and he is aided in his quest by Martin Brown, a CIA official, Lawrie Dayne, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, and Freddie, an Iraqi civilian. He hopes to be able to find out the truth from an Iraqi government official known only as "Magellan" but this earns him the wrath of US government official Clark Poundstone, who has a Special Forces team under his command...

Not to be confused with Green Hill Zone.


 * Big Bad: Poundstone.
 * Bittersweet Ending: With a possible helping of It Was His Sled.  However, , and of course the Iraq War drags on with little progress for another 7 years.
 * California Doubling: Morocco and Spain make for a pretty convincing Iraq.
 * CIA Evil, FBI Good - Inverted. DOD bad, CIA good. It helps the CIA agent's been in the Middle East for a long time and knows what'll happen.
 * The Dragon: The special forces team sent by Poundstone, led by Major Briggs.
 * Driving Question: Who is Magellan?
 * Foregone Conclusion: The war will continue to drag on for years. No matter what these fictional-but-based-on-real-people characters do, it's not affecting that.
 * Gray and Gray Morality -
 * Hellish Copter: Al Rawi's men shoot down a Delta Force helicopter with an RPG. The shot made it into the trailer, as it probably was expensive to shoot.
 * Intrepid Reporter: Lawrie.
 * Karma Houdini:
 * The movie ends
 * Let's Get Dangerous:
 * Shaggy Dog Story:
 * Strawman Political: Clark Poundstone.
 * Straw Man Has a Point - Deliberately so, however.
 * The Place: The movie is titled "Green Zone" (which is an area of safety from fighting), despite the fact that not much of the movie's action takes place in Baghdad's Green Zone, nor deals with the Green Zone itself.
 * Very Loosely Based on a True Story: All of the characters have a real life counterpart.
 * Visual Pun: A cut to children playing immediately follows a discussion about the future of Iraq, and the film ends with a shot of an oil refinery.