PrintMarch 15, 2010
'Green Zone' bombs at box office
"Green Zone," the story of a rogue US Army officer trying to unravel the alleged WMD deceptions and subterfuge of the Bush White House in the early weeks of the Iraq War, has flopped during its opening week. The film stars Matt Damon - one of Hollywood's most marketable actors - and essentially presents the liberal narrative of the Iraq War :
"Alice in Wonderland" raced to a $430 million haul at the worldwide box office on Sunday, while Matt Damon's new Iraq war conspiracy thriller "Green Zone" was one of the year's first big flops.
Damon plays a U.S. soldier questioning the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Reviews were mixed.
"Green Zone" opened at a distant No. 2 in North America with $14.5 million. Distributor Universal Pictures, which axed its top executives last fall after a poor run at the box office, had hoped for a slightly better showing.
"It's a bit of a disappointment," said Nikki Rocco, president of distribution at the General Electric Co unit.
"Green Zone" sells the dubious claim that Saddam Hussein completely dismantled his WMD programs in 1991 following the Gulf War, and that US intelligence was micro-managed and manipulated by the White House -- with help from the Wall Street Journal -- in a war of false pretenses.
Upon viewing the movie, several propaganda ploys are evident through the film: In one scene, Damon's character arrives at a prison to obtain information from a detainee, only to find that US interrogators have left the "family man" detainee (who days earlier had hosted a power meeting in his home of powerful Saddam loyalists) near death. In another, a Fox News broadcast of President Bush's so-called "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the USS Lincoln appears in the background as US reconstruction leaders bask in an orgy of wine, food, and song at a party celebrating the end of hostilities.
US Special Forces are portrayed as quasi-villains and tools of the White House cartel on the ground in the early days after Baghdad fell. Blackwater Security goons appear as props in virtually every other scene. The film argues quite impotently that if only we had absorbed all those thugs from the Saddam regime into the new government, Iraq would have been a veritable utopia from 2003-07.
Predictably, there is no mention in the movie of al Qaeda , Saddam's torture and rape chambers, the gassing of the Kurds in the late 1980s, or Saddam's refusal to cooperate with UN Weapons Inspectors in the years 1991-2003.
Universal Pictures appears to be having the same problems of its sister-General Electric unit MSNBC. While MSNBC's ratings continue to plummet due to its leftist slant, it appears that moviegoers have also voted with their feet.
After all, when Americans want to watch fantasy and make-believe, they would much rather spend their money on "Alice in Wonderland" than yet another liberal propaganda piece.
