The Paul Greengrass thriller called Green Zone is set to star a very familiar name alongside some new ones. Matt Damon is set to star alongside Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan and Antoni Corone according to reports today.

Although the film is inspired from the book by reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com), it will be a fictional thriller rather than a look at how the Americans handled the Iraq occupation.

The Green Zone is the protected area where U.S. troops stayed during the occupation of Iraq, and because they were so distanced and protected from normal Iraqi life, the leaders weren't part of the realities of everyday life and made some seriously flawed and detached decisions.

I'm sure that's not the problem with the Iraqi occupation, but it certainly is a big issue according to some critics, including Chandrasekaran.

According to Variety, Matt Damon will play an officer who teams up with a senior CIA officer to search for evidence of those never found weapons of mass destruction. Amy Ryan plays a New York Times reporter sent to Iraq to investigate the claims of the presence these weapons, and Greg Kinnear plays another CIA officer while Antoni Corone plays a colonel.

It sounds an interesting film, but a fictionalised story of the search? I'm not sure how that will play out with so many actual Iraq films on the go. Perhaps it'll help the film since the first few critical looks at the war have been less favourably received.