Oil company Connex merges with company Killen, which obtained the right for lucrative oil reserves in Kazakhstan, and thus lawyer Bennett gets the assignment to make the deal legal with any means possible... In Tehran, CIA agent Bob Barnes kills an arms smuggler. His new assignment is to kill prince Nasir in Beirut, but after getting beaten up by an Iranian spy, Bob decides to change his ways... In an oil-rich country in the Middle East, Pakistani immigrant Wasim loses his job in Connex. Due to desperation, he decides to become a terrorist and take revenge by blowing up a Connex-Killen tanker... Prince Nasir gives the drilling rights for oil in his country to a Chinese company, which angers the US and Connex. Even though Bob tries to save him, Nasir is killed by the CIA in order for his brother to change Nasir's policy and make a new oil contract with the US.
The episodic and fragmented story in the political essay "Syriana" is one of those that demand a lot of focus and investment from the viewers, and some may find it a hassle, but it rewards in the end appropriately, since everything in the end fits like a giant mosaic that gives a broader, unified picture of the events, and turns out as a good excercise for the brain. "Syriana" has no main protagonist—all the characters are just pawns in a giant geopolitical system of interests which clash with each other, in this case the oil industry which does everything to make a profit (and sustain the superpower status of the West at the same time), even resorting to criminal acts in order to "patch up" certain grey areas necessary to keep up the game. In its essence, the main theme is even simpler: greed and self-interest without limits, and the consequences left on all the people who find themselves in the way of the powerful ones. George Clooney is excellent as the slghtly overweight secret CIA agent Bob, from his first sequence where he kills arm dealers through a carm bomb in Tehran up to the tragic ending. Several lines are also quite somber, grim and sharp ("Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets!"). While raw and dry at times, with a few 'empty walks' here and there, "Syriana" is at times a fascinating holistic view of interconnected events of a system, and its "hypernarration" may have influenced TV shows which also depict several stories and characters as a whole, from "Game of Thrones" up to "McMafia".
Grade:+++
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