The Green Zone, and afterthoughts on Alice

Paul Greengrass’ hyperkinetic take on the boondoggle that launched the Iraq war adds little to what we already know, and is less persuasive than speculative accounts that have been rehashed ad nauseam in other media.  As “Green Zone” screeches to a thundering finale, where a single army officer takes on a helicopter augmented strike team of Special Forces, you wonder not only what its creators were thinking, but who they thought they were talking to.

It’s one thing for a movie to fictionalize recent history, but another for it to render it in the conventions of an overheated action movie.  It becomes even more of a stumbling block when the script fails to tell us more than we already know, at the same time it trumpets its concerns with blaring self importance.

Shortly after the occupation of Baghdad, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, (Matt Damon,) is assigned the risky task of securing the locations where Saddam supposedly stored weapons of mass destruction.  Several costly fire fights later, with nothing to show for his dangerous mission, Miller begins to doubt the accuracy of military intelligence.  When he complains at a briefing, his superiors all but squash him.

Reprimanded and ordered to continue, Miller decides to investigate the reliability of their intelligence on his own.  It soon becomes evident that the information on which the entire war is being prosecuted, originated from a single source.

Sound familiar? In addition to the already mentioned elements, the movie boasts a female journalist who’s alleged to have been tipped off about the whereabouts of Saddam’s WMDs.  Add to that a Baathist General on the run, whose face appears on a set of playing cards that identify him as the architect of the countries’ chemical warfare program.

Matt Damon plays Miller with more than his customary diligence.   Greg Kinnear oozes oil as a mendacious bureaucrat. Amy Ryan and Brendan Geeson, stellar character actors, decorate the scenery without chewing it up.  You yearn to see all of them in more challenging roles.

The opening siege is tense.  Greengrass’ recreation of Iraq in the grip of chaos, reportedly shot in Morocco, is appropriately harrowing.  He quickly establishes a landscape of pervasive upheaval, which, juxtaposed on life in the Green Zone, where women in bikinis casually fraternize with officers and press at poolside, speaks volumes about “multinational” forces.

But the movie isn’t content with the inherent tension of the locale and its tragedy. It wants to reduce the problem of the war and its advocates to a few bad guys with a single agenda.  As it hurtles forward, and that’s the only way to describe the way this one moves, the canvas keeps shrinking, until it seems like Damon is the only one in the country with the moxie to ferret out the truth. As the focus narrows to several characters on a collision course, he starts dodging bullets like a super hero out of Marvel comics.  Though I consider myself sympathetic to the movie’s politics, I found myself increasingly aggravated by its uncomfortable mix of matinee heroics and didactic tone.

Can you blame Brian Helgeland, an accomplished writer, for the way he’s treated the book, “Life In the Emerald City,” on which his screenplay is based? I haven’t read it so I can’t say, but I’ve heard the author, Rajiv Chandrasekaran speak,  and he came off as  far more sophisticated than the script that fronts his work.

Greengrass gave two Bourne thrillers, (“Bourne Supremacy,” and “Bourne Ultimatum,” a veneer of credibility that played smartly against their unlikely action scenes.  Credibility never became an issue, because nothing was at stake; you couldn’t fault the films, even when the camera cheated its way through chases and shoot outs that defied physics.

But “Green Zones’” relentless, hand held camerawork and sketchy lighting are more than distracting; they’re headache inducing.  In fact, most of the protracted action sequence that concludes the movie feels like it was shot from a camera attached to a bungee chord and dropped from a window.  Out of focus, dark, grainy images; pumped up by the bombastic score, insult your intelligence and gravity at the same time.

Last week, as I was composing a mildly negative review of Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland,” the movie was raking in 116 million at the box office.  This, after early industry wags predicted about half that figure. By Sunday night it was the biggest March opening on record.

These numbers, coming at what’s usually a slack period at the theaters, reveal several trends on the ascent:

Theater attendance has increased, moving almost inversely to the negative movement of the economy.  Under the circumstances you’d think people would be more inclined to sit in front of their flat screens at home; but no, they’re showing up at the multiplex with increasing frequency.  One possible explanation; movie tickets are a lot cheaper than weekend getaways.

Disney did an excellent job marketing the film; I knew this the moment I walked into a 9:45 screening at a small town theater in Florida and discovered the place  three quarters full, with mainly adults in the seats.

Burton and Depp are a draw; they’ve made enough films to have developed the kind of fan base that immediately responds to seeing their names together.  But Depp on his own doesn’t seem to mean as much; despite his charismatic lead in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” the movie struggled to break even.

3D is a compelling selling point; people seem willing to pay an extra three bucks for the clunky glasses the theaters insist you buy along with your ticket, that they then request you “recycle” on your way out. Recycle?  Hmmm?  Does that mean they’re going to charge you less the next time a 3D movie screens? I don’t think so.

The industry view is that the positive experience of the 3D “Avatar” created an appetite for more.  But you could see the germ of that earlier in the year, when a number of otherwise standard issue horror titles, distinguished only by spurting blood and body parts, earned substantially more than they should have.

As is rapidly becoming the norm, Alice’s 3D effects were added in post production. According to the editors, the decision to enhance the high def footage didn’t come until mid January, about 6 weeks before its scheduled release date.  Digital images, as it turns out, lend themselves to the illusion of depth.  All it takes is gobs of money and scores of artist/technicians.   Alice was completed in time for its scheduled release, at a reported 200 million, although the studio may have cooked that figure to impress the media. One never knows.

Disney was smart in its placement of “Alice,“ at precisely the moment “Avatar’s” popularity began to wane, although compared to James Cameron’s masterwork, Burton’s movie comes off like a gallery of stills.  The studios are well aware that theaters worldwide have been equipped for the new medium.  But they couldn’t have anticipated the huge cash bounty Avatar called forth. Now that the floodgates have opened, a host of other features, like “Clash of the Titans,” are currently being overhauled to take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable taste for images that float in space

So we can expect in a steady stream of 3D, at least until the public gets sideswiped by a string of bloated losers, almost a certainty.  Or people just grow weary of actors hanging in front of them like super sized lap dancers.

We’ll soon see how word of mouth impacts “Alice’s” second week. I overheard a lot of grumbling on my way out of the theater.   But it doesn’t really matter, as Disney’s second pass at “Alice” has already rung the cash register to the tune of 240 million worldwide.