Happening on Tuesday again. This time I blame the internets. They weren’t working yesterday.
Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005)
I broke my pledge to watch nothing new other than Battlestar Galactica until I caught up with the series, but sometimes pledges don’t work.
Syriana is kind of the Traffic of the oil industry except that the plot is thicker (yes, just as oil is thicker than bongwater). Drug smuggling is pretty easy to figure out, but the intersections between Arab nations, energy analysts, Big Oil and the US government is a bit shadier and just as sleazy.
The film is surprisingly low-key considering that it involves a CIA spy, terrorist organizations including Hezbollah, predator drones, an electrified pool, and a fair number of explosions. Everything reeks of evil, double dealing, ethics and morals of convenience, and that peculiar form of “patriotism” that justifies all atrocities, and yet everything in the film is presented in such a routine manner that it all comes across looking banal, which is, I think, the point.
The most intriguing character is George Clooney’s CIA operative, the most ordinary and believable movie spy I’ve ever seen. He’s a tool of the governement, itself a tool of Big Oil, and he carries out his assignments with diligence and a shrug. Only towards the end of the film does he finally see the big picture, and he realizes, just as the audience has finally put together the scattered pieces of this film, what an ugly picture it is.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
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