MOVIE REVIEW: GREEN ZONE

My wife and I went to see Green Zone over the weekend. The movie has had a lot of hype in the media and was touted as another Bourne Identity and Bourne Ultimatum. I have to admit that I came away from the movie disappointed.

Matt Damon, whom I like as an actor plays a man who discovers something is amiss in searching for WMD's in the Gulf War. The plot was good and follows the suspicions of many, that they didn't exist. This said, the movie was rated R and needless to say extremely rough gutter language. That was a turn off, even though it depicts "reality." Just gets tiresome to here every other word be a blankety blank. The plot of the movie was good and the basis for the movie was good. It was action packed as you might expect. Yet, the movie right in the crux of having you going takes a dramatic turn to the disappointing. Enter the bureaucrats who throw around their weight and seek to squash Damon's character from exposing the truth. From that point, the movie loses its wind and gets lost in a fog of twist and countertwists. In fact, you get the distinct impression the movie that it is making an anti-war policy statement.

The movie is based upon a book by Ravi Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad Bureau Chief with the Washington Post and the author of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." There's a secret informant named "Magellan", loosely based on the discredited "Curveball" and an Iraqi exile waiting to take the presidential reins but the people oppose the imposing of occupational "puppet" rulers. This leaves the person watching the movie with the impression that the Iraqi's would rather have had Hussein and his sons in power than a democratic government.

I guess that whether you enjoy the movie or not will depend on whether you were for the war or against it. AS for me personally, I believe it falls well below the caliber of Bourne Identity or Supremacy. I could have read the newspaper and come away with the same feeling that this movie left me with and spent far less money.

Mixing Myth and Scripture - Getting the Facts Straight

I've been searching for a topic to write on and this one happened to pop out. In a new discovery reported by DISCOVERY today, there is a title "Slaves Didn't Build Pyramids: Egypt." (http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/pyramids-tombs-giza-egypt.html)

The article states, "The mud-brick tombs were uncovered last week in the backyard of the Giza pyramids, stretching beyond a burial site first discovered in the 1990s and dating to the 4th Dynasty (2575 B.C. to 2467 B.C.), when the great pyramids were built on the fringes of present-day Cairo.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves, creating what Egyptologists say is a myth later propagated by Hollywood films.

Graves of the pyramid builders were first discovered in the area in 1990 when a tourist on horseback stumbled over a wall that later proved to be a tomb. Egypt's archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said that discovery and the latest finds last week show that the workers were paid laborers, rather than the slaves of popular imagination.

Hawass told reporters at the site that the find, first announced on Sunday, sheds more light on the lifestyle and origins of the pyramid builders. Most importantly, he said the workers were not recruited from slaves commonly found across Egypt during pharaonic times."

This is interesting and I do not dispute the findings. What is interesting to me is how people in general assume things, and the assumptions become scripture. People have assumed, probably because of Herodotus and Cecil B. DeMills, that because the movies show the Jews in bondage, that they must have been the pyramid builders of the past. Yet, the scripture does not mention anything about them building the pyramids (Ex.2:23; 6:5,6,9; 13:3,14; 20:2). It simply says that they were in bondage or slavery and that they made mud-bricks. It is also interesting that the Jews dwelt in Goshen in the northeastern delta extending from Succoth to Piramesse. Cairo is is along the Nile immediately south of the point where the river leaves its desert-bound valley and branches into the low-lying delta region with the city itself residing on the east bank.

Something to notice in the Discovery Article above, is that it does not deny that there were slaves during the times of the Pharoahs. So, both this article, with the scripture have shown us that the Bible accord is still correct, and the assumptions of man have been burst again. So, the next time we tell the story of the Exodus, let's not paint things into the picture that aren't there. As well, let's not jump on some discovery bandwagon and shout the Bible is wrong, without investigating what it DOES say first!