Oil tastes like candy.

“Syriana is a very real term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East” (Gaghan).

Syriana is written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, the writer of Traffic. What’s different about Syriana? A few things, but most importantly the film doesn’t have a meaningful conclusion, none of the characters problems are resolved, no one really has learned from their mistakes. Some people have died, and some people live, some become richer, some poorer. This can be frustrating to a lot of people who are used to seeing Hollywood’s latest and greatest. Films that are fun for the whole family, films where the good guys always triumph, and the bad guys always fall.

Here there aren’t any good guys… although there are good traits of some of the characters, everyone is a bad guy. The story is about oil, and the conflict between oil politics at home and those abroad. It traces the lives of people in all levels of the industry, from poor immigrants working in an Iranian oil facility, to the top of the top, Texas oil men who happen to also work in congress. George Clooney is the outlier, an ex-CIA operative who does his missions without asking why, that is until he gets blamed for international crimes he was paid by our government to do. Plus we get to see him get his fingernails pulled out with a pair of pliers.

The film’s pretty unsympathetic to all of its characters, except perhaps for the one we hate the most. The Arab oil worker in Iran, who after a merger between two oil companies which he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, is out of a job. When he goes to try to be a soldier for the government he gets the shit kicked out of him by a couple of cops without any merit. The only people that treat him with kindness and respect are these fundamentalist Muslim whackos. The kids not evil, he just didn’t have anywhere to turn. These fundamentalists brain wash the boy into doing things far worse than being beaten by cops or going hungry.

This isn’t that the film is taking sides in all this. It’s equally criticizing American politics, foreign politics, and Muslim extremism. I really don’t understand how oil gets from the ground of Iran to the pump of Idaho and only costs us $2 a gallon, especially when everybody knows it’s running out. After the oil is gone the Middle East’s economy will no longer be existent. What’s nice about Syriana though, besides the fact that it is entertaining, and never boring, is that it lets us follow all these pieces and after the films over we can step back and get a better look at the whole puzzle.

My only real complaint about the whole thing is that, although the movie is beautiful, and the landscapes of the Middle East are mesmerizing, the films camera work, editing, and overall style, doesn’t match that of Traffic, a film written by Gaghan, but directed by Steven Soderbergh. This is not to say that the camera work and editing of Syriana is bad, just that Traffic's was really good. If I was giving this a grade, I’d probably do a B+ or an A-, something around that tune.