[andyfox]

Just saw the movie. Didn't like it. David Denby's review in The New Yorker sums up a lot of my feelings, so I'll quote from it:

Syriana . . . is a major film without being a great film. It's a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one.

. . . like the cocaine trade in Traffic," oil is the life, the obsession, the only reality. It gets people killed, tortured, blown up, thrown on the junk heap.

As you watch the movie, with its twenty or so characters, many of them duplicitous, you have to keep reminding yourself who each one is and who he works for. It's as if you were constantly prepping for a quiz.

The oddness of "Syriana" is a result of its form: the many characters take what reality they have solely from their participation in Gaghan's intricate plan, and some of them get lost. In brief, this is an epic movie without a hero or a protagonist--or, rather, the protagonist is the oil business itself, which controls everyone. So much money can be made in oil, the movie says, that no one working in it would be foolish enough to behave ethically.

That perception may be why Gaghan constructed "Syriana" as he did. But if good people are considered ineffectual to begin with, or, even worse, a nuisance or irrelevant, then it's virtually impossible to construct a story around their efforts.

What's going on? At the moment, mere activity has replaced storytelling, irony has replaced heroism, and the taste of victory has turned to wormwood and gall.

[end quotes]

An interesting movie, but not a good one.