Syriana tries to be more than a sum of it’s parts, but part of it is missing. This is a plot in search of characters. There are a lot of character starts but none of them are developed enough to say that they are complete. This is a plot driven movie and there is little in it besides plot.
This movie is about everything other than story. That is not a bad thing. There are also movies that have very little story, and they aren’t about anything else either. This movie wants to be about bit things. It wants to tie together all of the bits of the geopolitical intelligencio-economic world and it is a tall order for 120 minutes of film. It would probably fit nicely into 120 volumes, but we don’t read anymore.
Exposing a connection between big oil, big politics and big intelligence would be easy to do, if such a connection existed. If there was a link, there has to be one clerk somewhere who has the original copies of the evidence. Bureaucracies make paper, and clerks handle paper, and one of them would know what the paper means. Those clerks have not stepped forward to expose the guilty, and this movie doesn’t make a convincing case for them. Things are told in broad stroke, as fits a movie pushing 4 separate plot lines.
The central premise of this movie is that there exists a bunch of conspirators at the highest levels of the government and business worlds who are so clever as to not be caught. Moreover, they act with the blessing of the government. This is at odds with the current scandals in Washington, DC. Recent events show that the conspirators need not operate under the cover of secrecy. They can operate in the open and dare the government to do something about it.
This is an interesting movie, if only to see what doesn’t work in it.
And stop with the jerky camera movements already. It doesn’t add to the story, it just makes me cranky.