Green Zone is a 2010 action thriller film[4] directed by Paul Greengrass and written by Brian Helgeland, based on the 2006 non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

[5] The key players in the film are General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), who is hiding in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, and US Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), a Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) leader who is searching for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

His efforts to find the true story about the weapons are blocked by US Department of Defense official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear).

Four weeks later, US Army CBRN Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and his platoon check a warehouse for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

After a firefight with a sniper, Miller finds that the warehouse is empty, the third consecutive time an official mission has led to a dead end.

Afterwards, CIA Officer Martin Brown tells him that the next place he is to search was inspected by a United Nations team two months prior and that it, too, has been confirmed empty.

Meanwhile, US Department of Defense official Clark Poundstone welcomes returning Iraqi exile politician Ahmed Zubaidi at the airport.

Meanwhile, while checking another unpromising site, Miller is approached by an Iraqi who calls himself "Freddy", who tells him that he saw some Ba'ath Party VIPs meeting in a nearby house.

In January 2007, after completing The Bourne Ultimatum, director Paul Greengrass announced his intent to adapt a film of the 2006 non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a journalist for The Washington Post.

Greengrass carried out extensive research into the background to the conflict, reading journalists such as Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, James Risen, Thomas Ricks, and Ron Suskind, in addition to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, whose book he optioned.

The issue of the culpability of the Fourth Estate, i.e. the mainstream (news) media, or MSM, in taking intelligence at face value, although embodied by a single character, represents a broad based failing in both the US and UK, but for Greengrass the fault ultimately lay with those trying to manipulate them.

[19] Greengrass has said that both the Bourne films and Green Zone reflect a widespread popular mistrust of authority that was engendered by governments that have deliberately lied and have let their citizens down over the Iraq war.

[15] Instead, it began at the Los Alcázares Air Base in Spain[21] on January 10, 2008,[7] moved to Morocco, and finished filming in the UK in December 2008.

The site's critics consensus reads: "Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass return to the propulsive action and visceral editing of the Bourne films – but a clichéd script and stock characters keep those methods from being as effective this time around.

[28] The action in "Green Zone" is followed by Greengrass in the QueasyCam style I've found distracting in the past: lots of quick cuts between hand-held shots.

Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film 4 stars and wrote that Green Zone is "one hell of a thriller.

"[29] James Berardinelli of ReelView gave the film 3.5 stars, stating that the "most rewarding aspect of Green Zone is the manner in which it interweaves fact and fiction into an engaging whole.

Reel can’t quite match real in portraying this aspect, but Green Zone will nevertheless provoke thoughts as well as thrills — it’s an honest, compelling, smart blockbuster that dares to deliver on several levels.

"[32] Ilana Ozernoy in Newsweek criticized the film's "popcorn-crunching conventions" and simplification of the source material, writing "if Green Zone were an exercise in bubble-gum pop, I would have chewed happily.

"[34] In the UK, Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph conceded that "with all we retrospectively know about the wool-pulling to make the case for war, it's a kick to follow a main character on the ground who smells a rat"; he nevertheless criticized the film for lacking credibility in its portrayal of a rogue hero who never faces a reprimand and never suffers paranoia.

[40] Film critic A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times that "the inevitable huffing and puffing about this movie's supposedly left-wing or 'anti-American' agenda has already begun".

[41] An article on Fox News.com states, "Given this set-up, audiences are encouraged to root for Miller's rogue activities and against the government, represented in the film by a corrupt Pentagon chief played by Greg Kinnear.

[43] Gonzales wrote that, on the one hand, the film captures the critical intelligence blunders prior to the war and de-Baathification program that ensured that the conflict was costly and complicated.

Indeed Miller's vision of exposing the WMD conspiracy and the CIA's plan to keep the Iraqi army is undermined by the film's wildcard – a nationalist Shia war veteran who turns the plot on its head before delivering the killer line to the Americans when he tells them: 'It is not for you to decide what happens here [in this country].

'"[45] Greengrass defended his film in an interview with Charlie Rose, saying, "The problem, I think, for me is that something about that event strained all the bonds and sinews that connect us all together.