Green Zone (film)

Green Zone is a 2010 British action thriller film 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. The book documented life within the Green Zone in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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). Miller finds that the majority of the intel given to him is inaccurate. His efforts to find the true story about the weapons are blocked by US Department of Defense official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). The cast also features Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla, and Jason Isaacs.

The film was produced by Working Title Films, with financial backing from Universal Pictures, StudioCanal, Relativity Media, Antena 3 Films and Dentsu. Principal photography began in January 2008 in Spain, later moving to Morocco and the United Kingdom.

Green Zone premiered at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Japan on 26 February 2010, and was released in Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Singapore on 11 March 2010, followed by a further 10 countries the next day, among them the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. The film generally received mixed critical reviews and was a box office bomb, as it cost $100 million to produce plus $40 million in marketing, while the global theatrical runs grossed only $94,882,549.