greguva

As with most reviewers here, I came out of the movie theater after seeing Syriana muttering under my breath, "What was that about?" After much thought, it occurred to me that the filmmakers must either be incredibly naive to think that their audience would be able to make sense of this movie, or they fully intended for the audience to be confused. I may be giving them the benefit of the doubt here, but with veterans like George Clooney, Christopher Plummer and William Hurt in the cast, I'm inclined to think the filmmakers knew what they were doing. Which begs the question, Why? I don't claim to know the answer, but it may be that what the filmmakers were trying to get across to us is the reality that there is no sense to be made of the oil mess. When greed, power, fear, blind nationalism and money guide men's actions, logic and morality are left out in the cold. And the webs of entanglement that have been spun between nations, corporations, intelligence agencies, and the wealthy in pursuit of oil are such that it is probably impossible to sort out the relationships. The good guys turn into bad guys, the bad guys turn into good guys (momentarily at least), and everyone is left with an oily residue.

This is not a movie for those who like their morality plays cut and dried with an obvious message. This is a movie intended to leave its viewers with bad tastes in their mouths, with the realization that we are all players in this game. With any luck, some of those viewers will buy Toyota Priuses instead of SUVs the next time they purchase a vehicle.

My 14 year old son had seen this and highly recommended it, so I gave it a shot. Throughout the movie, I kept saying to myself, "This is 2 hours I'll never get back!" Fortunately, it's not quite that long (I also missed the first 5 minutes, so that's a bonus). With the exceptions of Kip's transformation and Napoleon's presidential 'skit', both of which occurred near the very end of the movie, none of the characters in this film did or said anything substantially different from one scene to the next for the entire length of the movie, nor did they encounter any situations that were the least bit interesting. They didn't even go as far as changing facial expressions. This might have made an interesting 5 minute SNL skit, but a full length feature movie it is not! Maybe you have to be 14 to appreciate it.

If you want to watch a compelling movie with interesting high school nerds, check out Bill Forsyth's "Gregory's Girl", Mark Waters's and Tina Fey's "Mean Girls", Tony Bill's "My Bodyguard", or Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused". Leave this one alone!