Go Greener, Australia

Syriana is a fictional movie that asks serious questions: Who are the people involved in the oil industry? and what do they get out of it? Environmentalists already know that our addiction to oil is a problem we must solve; and yet other people are more than happy for things to stay just as they are now. Syriana is a political thriller that doesn’t give us any glib answers, but does try to uncover the extent of the problem.

I’d been warned that it was a difficult movie to follow, so I was ready to pay attention right from the start. There is no main character, unless you think of oil as the main character, so instead the movie follows people working at all levels of the oil industry. By seeing events all over the world, the audience gains more understanding of the whole process than any individual character in the movie can. It flits from one storyline to the next, and sometimes there’s a connection, and sometimes there isn’t. Stephen Gaghan’s previous movie Traffic, which was about the drug trade, had a similar structure.

George Clooney plays a CIA agent working in the Middle East region. He’s dedicated his life to the CIA, but they don’t have the same loyalty towards him, and abandon him after a mission goes wrong. Matt Damon plays a financial advisor who, through a tragic accident, becomes acquainted with an Arabic prince from an unnamed Middle Eastern country. This prince, played by Alexander Siddig, wants Damon to be his advisor as he reforms his nation, wanting to use their oil riches to create democracy and a better future for his people. However, his father (the emir) and his younger brother prefer to live the high life while letting the USA make all the decisions about where their oil will go.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, we see a young lawyer investigating the merger of two oil companies, and watch as his superiors and the oil company CEOs tell him how to make his decisions. This is the part I found most confusing: there’s only so many men in suits I can keep track of, so Chris Cooper’s oil man and Jeffrey Wright’s lawyer are the only ones I have a clear idea about. But this didn’t seem to stop me from understanding the plot, so maybe they were meant to be faceless and interchangeable after all.

Finally, we see two young Pakistani men, who used to work for an oil drilling station in the Middle East, but have now been laid off from their jobs. They want to learn Arabic in order to get more work in the oil region, since there’s very little work for them in their home country. They get to know a cleric at the Islamic school, who is friendly and understands their problems. These young men are the most sympathetic characters in the whole movie: they play games and laugh with their friends, while facing the same struggles any guy might if he lived in a country with no work and no support for the jobless. But where can they go from there?

Overall, I think Matt Damon’s character sums up the movie best when he tells the prince “What are they thinking? They’re thinking that it’s running out. It’s running out… and ninety percent of what’s left is in the Middle East. This is a fight to the death.” It’s a politically-charged movie, with just one good guy (I won’t spoil it by telling you who), and a lot of other people trying to justify their grey moral choices. The bleak outlook is a little lightened by the extras on the DVD, where the director and George Clooney chat about the usual movie-making things (exotic locations, getting celebrities for the roles) as well as giving their take on the issue of oil addiction.

You can see a preview at the official Syriana website, along with interviews with the Gaghan and Clooney. Metacritic has gathered many reviews of it, and you can see how the movie got it’s name at Wikipedia (warning: some spoilers on that page).

Tags: movie, movie review, oil

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 7:06 pm and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.