Green Zone, which brings together reunites Bourne director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, has some of the same gritty tension from the streets of Baghdad that made The Hurt Locker so gripping. But unlike Locker, which concentrated on the personal and battlefield experiences of a handful of soldiers, Green Zone is wrapped in a package designed to tell the story of the whole sorry mess of how we got into the war in the first place and how we got on the path that led Iraq to years of sectarian violence. It’s an ambitious goal for what is superficially an action movie, and if one accepts the simplifications of that story as legitimate artistic license, it is a goal that is pulled off quite neatly.

It is painful to watch Chief Warrant Officer Miller (Damon) and his team going into dangerous sites in and around Baghdad looking for the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction that will never be found. In spite of pointed directives from his superiors that his is not to question why, his is but to dig and try, Miller wants to understand why the intelligence reports are consistently wrong. When an Iraqi informs him of a suspicious meeting of high-ranking Iraqi military in a nearby house, Miller takes part of his team “off the reservation” to go after a target that won’t turn out to be a figment of everyone’s imagination. This leads him into a power struggle between the cocky young mastermind of Iraqi reconstruction, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), an underling and proxy for Paul Bremer – the man behind the policy of de-Baathification, and one wizened CIA agent, played by Brendan Gleeson, who had the sense to see the turmoil that was about to ensue.

With Greengrass’s characteristic fast-moving handheld camera tracking chaotic chases and action, and Miller’s dogged pursuit of the truth behind the faulty intelligence reports, Green Zone manages to make you believe for a time that things might turn out differently. And it is smart enough at the same time to emphasize that even a different outcome, perhaps better by some standards, would have been a bloody, and a moral, mess.