But "Green Zone" takes a different tack, going beyond a policy debate or a platoon profile to wade instead into the murky waters of American foreign relations via an explosive, pulse-pounding action thriller. It's "The Bourne Identity" meets "Fahrenheit 9/11," an action film that's not afraid to have a passionate political point of view.

Not that the story starts political. We ride alongside Miller (Matt Damon) as he races up to a tense scene in Iraq during the first days of the conflict. He's been tasked to lead his team into the WMD zones, where informants have told the American government that Saddam Hussein is hording biological weapons.

Miller finds himself in an impossible position. He is a friend to no one, and an enemy to everyone. As he tries to track down WMD leads, his superiors keep undercutting him. He gets a prisoner, and the brutal interrogators take over. He leaves a clean WMD site to go follow a hot lead instead, and his bosses want to know why he abandoned his post.

On the other side of this story are the everyday Iraqis he meets, who are at first helpful but then suspicious of the ways in which Americas are bulldozing neighborhoods and disbanding the governmental structures that this nation relied on to function.

There's also the reporter that Miller runs into, the reporter who wrote stories before the war about WMDs but never fact-checked them. Miller can't find a single person who will confirm that WMDs are here. It seems as if someone made up a story, and no one thought to ask a second source.

Miller sprints and shoots, he panics and strategizes and it all builds up to a rather shocking finale in which we realize that this is a war film without the possibility of a hero. What can Miller do to fix the situation? He's a brilliant soldier, but inadequate in this kind of illogical chaos.

"Green Zone" has plenty of rage, but also plenty of sympathy for the soldiers we sent into the hurricane, naively thinking Iraq was going to be like any other battlefield we had ever encountered.