Syriana
Here’s the plot of Syriana, as I understood it:
A man (Matt Damon) who does the financial news for a pay-TV station loses a child when his son drowns in the pool owned by the Prince of some Middle East country that ends in "izstan", and then strangely becomes the financial advisor to…
The same Prince who owned the pool, who wants to sell Izstan’s previously untapped oil supply to the highest bidder in China so he can generously put the money back into his country and help his fellow man, and who becomes pissed that the U.S. have made him out to be a terrorist just because he isn’t doing business with them, unlike…
His brother, who is also in line to be king of Izstan, and is an arrogant playboy idiot who wants to sell the black gold to…
America, home to evil corporations, two of which are merging illegally to form a super-evil-corporation that will monopolise the oil and in doing so cause the retrenchment of…
Some exploited migrant workers who grow even more disillusioned and predictably become terrorists who blow up…
An oilrig that is drilling for the evil American corporation who are being investigated by an equally corrupt…
Black guy, who has the screen presence of a sedimentary rock, and whose personal life is dominated by an older black guy who just keeps sitting on the other guy’s steps until he gets invited into his house for a…
Beer, which was probably cool and refreshing, and most likely drunk on numerous occasions by the fat and hairy…
George Clooney, who apart from being fat and hairy is also a spy although I never really did figure out exactly what he did but whenever he was on screen something blew up or someone got tortured so naturally he was my favourite character and Clooney is much, much cooler than…
Some old guy who was in The Sound Of Music aptly plays an old guy here who I’m sure was somehow cleverly linked back to…
The black guy, who in the film’s last scene again invites his friend/dad/whomever the fuck it is who keeps sitting on his damn steps in for a beer – thus making the circle of oil and beer complete.
WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN THIS FUCKING MOVIE???
Okay, so we are all connected, a butterfly flaps his wings and fires some Arabs from its oilrig and it causes a hurricane of terrorism over the other side of the world. Am I close? Oil is evil. Bad, bad stuff. Causes war and death and George Clooney to get fat. I think I got the themes here, but the plot left me numb. It worked for me in Traffic, where the drug war was presented on a much more personal and relatable front, but here we had Princes and terrorists and black guys sitting on steps wanting beer and numerous innocuous scenes with these characters’ families that meant shit fucking all.
In my admittedly limp understanding of this film I felt that Matt Damon’s character was utterly pointless – it was the Prince who was important in that story strand, but maybe because there wasn’t a prolific enough Arab-looking actor they had to invent some white-guy roles to sex the whole thing up. What exactly did the death of his character’s son in a swimming pool have to do with oil? Is that another clever statement on something that I have failed to grasp?
I could take the tact of some reviewers who seem just as inept at figuring this film out, but praise it anyway for its "intricacy" and "depth"– but dammit I have seen the Emperor and he is butt-naked. Just because I didn’t get it doesn’t mean I am going to cover my ass and say it thus must have been brilliant.
As a general rule I don’t like films that make me feel stupid and ignorant. I happily admit that I don’t know shit about the Middle East and the politics of oil – hell I wasn’t even really aware of Muslim people until 2001. I know I should strive to educate myself more on such topics, especially in this current climate – which is half the damn reason I went to check this out – but I feel no richer or smarter for having seen Syriana.
Sure, this is a hot, hot, hot topic, which some could claim makes it one of the most important films of the year, but you should not confuse important with entertaining, or in this case even cohesive. This film didn’t suck for me because I wasn’t hip to its discourse or rhetoric. It sucked because it was a poorly structured and plotted film, which tried to cover every angle of the debate and failed in making any of them engaging in the least. The few tense ‘actiony’ sequences that shook me awake were obviously injected into the script in the hope of alleviating the monotony of talking heads after talking heads – the same reason why the film zipped around the world changing locale every four fucking seconds. Nevertheless through 90% of this film I was bored or confused. Often both.