Syriana

Where to begin, where to begin. I guess, with a synopsis, since this movie was borderline obscure when released. Syriana is an ensemble cast movie with several different stories taking place at once, all having some connection to the oil industry in the middle east. It was made by section 8 studios, a company founded by George Clooney, who is also one of the main characters in the movie.

View the Trailer

Here's what I'll say about it that's not so good. It was a little slow, a little heavy on the political side, and sort of hummed along at a steady pace for very large stretches, with only a few major peaks of tension.

What I'll say good about it - those few moments of tension are AWESOME. The movie was directed/written by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote Traffic. Traffic, for those of you who don't remember, was very much in the same vein as Syriana, only centered around the Mexican drug cartels and not Middle Eastern oil. This guy knows his crap, and he writes the "behind the scenes" issues and politics of the world's problems with amazing believability. The movie feels like you're actually watching something you're never supposed to know happened or existed.

Also worth noting...
George Clooney did an AMAZING job in this movie. back when he was on ER, he was so full of smirks, grins and funny headbobs and twinkly romantic flirty looks that he was almost annoying to watch. When he was in Three Kings, the director David O. Russell beat the living shit out of him in the middle of the desert he was so frustrated with Clooney's little quirks and how he was acting. You can tell he's gotten better about it. (In Clooney's defense, Russell is a little bit of a jerk and didn't want Clooney from the beginning, so he was a marked man)

For more on that story, see the book Rebels on the Backlot. Highly enjoyable and recommended reading for anyone who likes movies but doesn't care too much for academic/textbook style non-fiction. It's so good it feels like fiction when you're reading it. Phew, I'd marry that book if it had the parts necessary for creating posterity. Too far? Yeah, um....this is awkward.

And now, the Syriana Soap Box.

This movie might be a huge call to arms for oil conservationists, alternative fuel activists, blah blah blah I went to the movie for astoryandI'mgettingthiscalltoarmscrapWHATTHEHELL.

Anyone who has ever made a decent movie (perhaps with the exception of Stephen Gaghan and Steven Soderbergh, director of Traffic) will tell you that making a movie to change the world is a bad idea. Big ideas don't make good stories. If you tell a good story and a big idea shows up, then great, good job.

I'm personally growing weary of politically motivating movies, and I haven't even seen Paradise Now, Goodnight and Good luck OR Munich yet all of which are very politically driven films released in the last half of this year. I really want to see them all, but I feel like it's some sort of unhealthy vice. I know when I leave the theatre, I'll feel a little sad, a little numb, and sort of angry, wanting to write a letter to someone and have whatever problem fixed immediately by the powers that be. Five seconds later, I realize writing letters is stupid. But I go see them anyway, and get my depression fix. As if there's not enough of that floating around.

I think the danger lies in the fiction of a movie like Syriana. Many people treat movies like this like documentaries, when they're far from it. It gives people a warped sense of what's going on in the world, and it's very discomforting to see these movies masquerade as 'information'.

Lastly.

If political movies tickle your fancy, go see this. If you are interested in learning about what is *fictionally* the oil industry, a good guess at what it might be like, then go see this. If you've seen Traffic, Beyond Borders, or any of the movies mentioned above and liked them, you'll like this movie, too, but don't expect it to knock your socks off. If you haven't seen any of the movies mentioned here (you need go to the friggin' blockbuster more often), this movie is a great introduction to the political activism movie genre.