Matt Damon Gets Bourne Again in Green Zone Trailer

When Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass agreed to keep making Bourne movies for Universal, there was an implicit promise that in doing so, the studio would let the two men make a tougher, more uncommercial film like the Iraq war thriller Green Zone. Now, the trailer for Green Zone's been released, and we can see why Universal was so quick to accede to the pair's demands -- with a little trailer-cutting sleight-of-hand, Green Zone can be sold as The Bourne Identity, but with sand.

Indeed, the clip's got everything we'd usually expect from a Bourne film: handheld camera movies, close-quarters fight sequences, an oily supporting actor giving an execution order via cell phone, and a plot where Matt Damon is determined to find secrets and won't rest until he has them! And hey, maybe that's the movie -- only it's allegedly based on the considerably less flashy book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which is less "action thriller" and more "well-researched study of how America's reconstruction of Iraq went awry." I suppose some concessions have to be made in cinematically realizing a nonfiction tome like that one, but I'd still love it if Damon badgered his secretive superiors for ANSWERS, then found the evidence he needed during a fifteen-minute sequence where he surfed Daily Kos.

VERDICT: Holding out for AN ANSWER, DAMMIT...and a second trailer.