Syriana¶
333 words on Films
Syriana is a remarkable film in that it isn’t mainly gooey happy as most other Hollywood film and not arty-farty as many European films but that it tries to give us a taste of the oil world. A world that is quite important for our everyday life.
And the taste we get has many different faces to it – none of which is really one you’d entrust the care for an all-important resource like oil. From the undeservedly rich businesspeople, to the career driven intelligence manager, from the creepy lawyer to numbly rich sheik and his inept son, from the incredibly naïve energy analyst (Matt Demon, whom I just can’t take seriously when playing people who are older than sixteen or twenty) to the tool-like intelligence officer, from the Pakistani guest worker to a religious nutter. Each of them somehow fills their role well and they all interact, but they all have completely different aims and rather harmful negotiation skills.
The film seems to want to tell us that the rich will be richer, the dumb will be dumber and that each of us can help them achieve just that buy burning more oil. In a way I thought that at over two hours the film was too long, but then again, it may just have been too short to actually fill all of those different roles more than superficially. I don’t know. Not a bad film. But I wasn’t overwhelmed either.
There were many things I didn’t understand in the film. To begin with – as seen in the image above – why would an obscenely rich oil company which doesn’t have to be hip with the youngsters and is run by old farts have a logo that looks like they’re actually a dot-com type business? And, more towards the dramatic side of the film, why did the little boy have to die in the pool? How did that improve the story? And how does the suicide bomber fit into the film?
