Rising to prominence as a leading actor during the mid-2000s, Damon captivated audiences with the “Bourne” trilogy. The latter two films, “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum,” were directed by Paul Greengrass, and their collaboration extended to “Green Zone.” This film aimed to transport the gritty realism of those adaptations into the context of America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, promising a hard-hitting narrative.

Despite its ambitions, “Green Zone” struggled at the box office, joining the ranks of other Iraq War films like “Rendition” and “Lions For Lambs” with a global gross of $94 million against a $100 million budget. At the time, critics drew parallels to the “Bourne” films, noting the overuse of chaotic handheld camera work that muddled the storyline. Furthermore, the film’s script faced the daunting challenge of compressing the complexities of a war into a two-hour runtime, which, according to Rotten Tomatoes, resulted in “a clichéd script and stock characters,” earning it a middling 53% score.

The narrative unfolds in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, focusing on the “green zone” from where the Army managed their operations. Damon portrays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who is on a mission to locate the alleged weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion. The film presents a tense thriller that dissects the true motivations behind the war, exposing how the U.S. government orchestrated a pretext for their actions in Iraq.

The film takes place in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, in which the Army has established the eponymous “green zone” from which they have taken control of the country, and follows Matt Damon’s Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller as he searches for the supposed weapons of mass destruction that were the rationale for the invasion in the first place. What follows is a gripping, tense thriller that unravels the true intentions of the war, and lays out the mechanics with which the U.S. government manufactured an excuse to invade Iraq.

With this “ripped from the headlines” story adapted from the nonfiction book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandresekaran, Paul Greengrass hoped that he and Damon could bring that same evocative paranoia of the “Bourne” films to a true story, illuminating the murky truth of what happened in the weeks following the U.S. invasion at a time when the war was still winding down.

This is a level of topicality that most Hollywood films shy away from, but Greengrass dove head first into the project, with the goal of visualizing how our intelligence agencies fabricated evidence about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, plunging the country into a quagmire it couldn’t pull itself out of.

In 2010, with the war in Iraq not even officially over, it’s somewhat understandable that audiences weren’t champing at the bit to watch a film that was striving so hard to look like a documentary. But revisiting a film like “Green Zone” with fresh eyes is a powerful reminder of how we can use the language of film to shed light on important issues in our society.

This mindset was not popular in the early 2000s, when opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was not the political mainstream view, and that kind of thinking arguably lingered throughout the rest of the decade. But that has changed: even now, many of the best films of the past year, like “Warfare,” “Sinners,” “Eddington,” and “One Battle After Another” are very much following in the footsteps of “Green Zone” in terms of pertinence.

As Hollywood frets about how to keep the art of film relevant to audiences — with AI slop clogging social media feeds and threatening to spill over into movie theaters — these films prove that holding up a mirror to society and asking difficult questions isn’t just necessary, but is a positive path forward for telling engaging stories. “Green Zone” strove for such relevancy at a time where that wasn’t the popular, or profitable, choice to make.