Cinema - Syriana

The western world is largely powered by oil. Oil is running out. 90% of what’s left is in the Middle East. Simple facts. Syriana is a film which looks at the many consequences of these facts. It was made by Section 8, George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s politically motivated production company: Clooney also appears in the film as a jaded CIA agent instructed to assassinate a Syrian oil baron who has been dealing too closely with China for the US government’s liking.

This is one of many strands that the film weaves together: we also follow an oil broker (Matt Damon) trying to profit from the accidental death of his son in the house of an Arab oil Sheikh; a corporate lawyer (Jeffrey Wright) trying to sort out a dodgy merger between two US oil firms; and a Pakistani migrant worker (Mazhar Munir) coming under the spell of an Islamic fundamentalist. The result is a complicated geopolitical thriller which never lets you fully understand what’s going on; but leaves you realising that what you do piece together is bad, bad, bad for the world. Directed by Stephen Gaghan (the scriptwriter of Soderbergh’s Traffic), Syriana is a hand-grenade of a movie, designed to throw jags of conspiratorial shrapnel into the multiplex habitués brain. ‘Bout time. Hot stuff. DL