In the mid-2000s, Damon solidified his status as a Hollywood leading man through the “Bourne” series, particularly the latter two installments, “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum,” both directed by Paul Greengrass. Their collaboration continued with “Green Zone,” which aimed to infuse the raw, intense style of those adaptations into a narrative based on the true events surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Despite its potential, “Green Zone” followed in the footsteps of other Iraq War films like “Rendition” and “Lions For Lambs,” struggling at the box office with earnings of just $94 million against a $100 million budget. Critics at the time pointed out the film’s over-reliance on the frenetic, hand-held camera work that characterized the “Bourne” series, which here resulted in a visual style too chaotic to follow. Additionally, the screenplay’s attempt to encapsulate an entire war into a two-hour runtime felt cumbersome, leading to a lukewarm reception on Rotten Tomatoes where it scored 53%, criticized for its cliched script and generic characters.

Set in the chaotic period following the U.S. invasion, “Green Zone” centers on Matt Damon’s character, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, as he seeks out the elusive weapons of mass destruction that justified the war. The narrative unfolds as an intense thriller, exposing the true motives behind the conflict and detailing the fabricated premises that led to the Iraq invasion.

Greengrass embraced the challenge of tackling such a contentious subject head-on, attempting to visually dissect how intelligence agencies manufactured evidence that propelled the U.S. into a prolonged and costly conflict.

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.