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Published: 11 March 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THIS story starts in Baghdad on March 19, 2003. The Iraqi capital is on the receiving end of some serious “shock and awe”. It is not a gracious beginning to a film that eventually, and with difficulty, finds its feet. 

As those explosions light up the cinema screen, it’s hard to forget that every single explosion was paid for by your taxes. 

The Iraq War is now in recent history, and Hollywood has begun to turn its cameras in the direction of the conflict. While this is essentially an action film, it is also a barbed comment on how we were sold the idea of invading Iraq not because of the 30-odd years of oppression that Saddam’s dictatorship was responsible for, but because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction.  

Cameras pan groundwards, like a helicopter gunship. There is looting, chaos, with the American troops on the ground unwilling to exercise control. Director Paul Greengrass retreats to jerky and nauseating camera work to bring this fact home.

Our hero is hardened solider Miller (Matt Damon), whose team must find those pesky WMDs. They enter a deserted warehouse where intelligence says there should be a cache of chemical weapons. All there is is pigeon droppings. Miller smells a rat, a rat that gets stinkier when he meets a Washington Post journalist who has claimed widely in her articles that WMDs are to be found in every cellar in Iraq. As he quizzes her on where her information has come from, it becomes more and more apparent that the intelligence that has led to the war is a little thin. Thus Miller becomes less of a soldier and more of an investigator.

His crusade is helped by an Iraqi called Freddy (he actually has an Arabic name, but the Americans are too disrespectful to bother learning it) who wants to help – sick of the Saddam regime, he views the troops as liberators. Of course, Saddam was a horrid person and his rule was vicious and despicable. But as this film asks, where were the smoking guns, supposedly able to be sent westwards in 45 minutes, that prompted the invasion? 

While the anti-war credentials of this film are there in the plot, they are not much in evidence with the action – it is very much a big bang war film. And it would be a fool who thought of this as a critique of the war – you’d do well to go and read American journalist John Lee Anderson’s superb book, The Fall of Baghdad. 

This effort is like a macho version of In The Loop, or the Chilcot Inquiry with better looking leads. Its final message is that the Iraq war was a rubbish idea. Thanks, Mr Greengrass, for pointing that out.