If you've been alive this decade you know exactly what happens. They don't find any WMD's. Thus the film then focuses more on the (excuse my language but this is really the only suitable way to describe it) CLUSTER-FUCK of the whole situation. Delving into the struggle between US officials trying to cover their ass while the CIA tries to find out the real truth, with you're American Joe american soldier stuck in between just following orders. Now you may say to yourself, "Wow Dan, that really sounds like an interesting and compelling film". Well, I must say to you, no, no sir or madam, it play's out in the most contrived and boring fashion I think could be put to celluloid.
The biggest problem with the film is the dialog. It sounds like it's from a student film. Every character states their exact intentions, their exact feelings at the time, what they are thinking at the moment without any filter, and to top it off in the most clichéd way possible. I know we are in a military setting where most people talk pretty straight laced but this is just ridiculous. There is absolutely no subtleness in any characters lines, we know everyone's motivations from the very beginning thus drastically getting rid of any tension that could have been made later in the film. There is no mystery. It's like reading a the alphabet. Look at the Green Zone page on IMDB, under memorable quotes... there are no memorable quotes, because they are all as stale as a 4 month old turd.
The next worst if not equal worst part of the film is the characters. Matt Damon's lead role of Miller is about the most boring person you could follow. He's about as interesting as a cup of sand. His intentions are good in the film as all he wants to do is honestly find the truth behind why they aren't finding any WMD's but he's just so boring of a person that we don't even care if he succeeds or not. Every other character is a one note stereotype. We have the intrusive female news reporter, the douche bag Government Administration liaison guy who will do anything to cover up his governments mistakes, and the good guy CIA dude who wants to find out the "truth". It's really kinda painful watching these characters interact as we know exactly what they are going to say next before they even say it. None of them are compelling and only suffice in representing broad generalizations of the groups they are part of.
As I've talked about before in other reviews and my newest film, I really have a disgust for most CG. One of my biggest pet peeves in film is the use of CG Helicopters. They 99% of the time look like total crud. It really pisses me off. When you have a 100 million dollar budget, GET SOME REAL HELICOPTERS!! Seriously. It takes me out of the movie every time. I know they can be dangerous when doing dangerous things with them, but when operated by professionals they are safer than driving a car. When you are just flying them without doing any sort of stunt or maneuver there is no reason to do it in CG. Along with this film, another film of the many that unnecessarily did this was Terminator Salvation. The very last shot of that film had two CG helicopters fly into the sunset. It made me want to punch a puppy. It was so freaking stupid I wanted to stomp McG's face in with an Iron. God dammit. Stop. Do these helicopters do a loop-d-loop? No. Do they fight a big Robot? No. They just fly away from the camera towards the sunset. FTS. Anywho, back to Green Zone, there was a scene near the end where a Helicopter got shot with an RPG and crashed which didn't look too bad. But again, you can do that practically, for example Live Free or Die Hard, Rambo First Blood Part II, Rambo III, Die Hard With a Vengeance and Black Hawk Down. All the other shots with Helicopters weren't doing anything special, just regular old helicopter stuff, yet all CG. I really don't want to talk about this anymore because it's so stupid.
Another big problem I had with the film is not the fault of the filmmakers but the people in charge of marketing and cutting the trailer. So much of the trailer is footage from the climatic third act that I already knew a lot of what was going to go down before it eventually went down. Thus again deleting tension and mystery. It should be a more common practice for trailers not to show ANYTHING from the third act of a film. Too often it ruins the movie watching experience. The Dark Knight did it completely right because it showed nothing of the final 20 min of the film in the trailers. When I saw it for the first time I thought the movie was going to end at a much earlier point then which it eventually did because I had seen all the stuff in the trailers play out, so I was like, Oh ok I guess it's almost over now. Nope. It kept going and was even more captivating because i wasn't spoiled at all from any trailer footage. Bottom line is, movie trailers show off too much of films nowadays. What ever happened to the good old "Teaser", just a couple shots, sometimes no shots at all. If you know how it all plays out before you see it, well, you might as well just read the book version, and that's always boring as fudge.
I won't delve into how it is shot. Same old Greengrass shaky cam style. It works sometimes here, other times it's annoying. As usual. The night scenes look like total crap with all the grain.
Overall, this is the Iraq War film for stupid people. It's only use would be to show it to High School kids in 20 years that are too lazy to read what happened and want a simple straight forward dumb as doorbells "story" of what went down those many years ago in a sandpit on the other side of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment