DVD Extra


“Syriana” shows oil politics


“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

— Lord Acton, British historian

Oil is the lifeblood of our modern world. It keeps not only our cars and trucks moving, it is directly tied to everything in our economy. The low prices we enjoy at stores are due to oil’s ability to transport them to the store shelves. Plastics are derived from oil. That means everything from the diapers you put on your kid, to the keyboard you type at on your computer, to the cases you store your DVDs in.

The United States houses 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we consume 50 percent of its resources. To do that, we have various agencies, public and private, government and big business, to go to the places where the oil is and bring it back here, so we can make the world go around. Most of us don’t think about how the process works, and that’s the way we like it.

That’s what movies like “Syriana” hope to change. It’s an ambitious film, in that it tells us that the supply of oil is finite, and that the scarcer it gets, the higher the price goes. Not only in money, but in blood as well.

Roger Ebert described the film in his review about as well as anyone could. “The movie’s plot is so complex we’re not really supposed to follow it, we’re supposed to be surrounded by it. Since none of the characters understand the whole picture, why should we?”

George Clooney, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for the role, is a grizzled CIA agent who deals in the Middle East. Matt Damon is an oil futures trader who is trying to get a consulting contract with an emir (king) of a small Middle Eastern oil-producing nation. Jeffrey Wright is a lawyer trying to do “due diligence” on the merger of two of the biggest oil companies in the world.

There are plenty of other stars and interlocking stories in this film, but they are all just pieces of a larger puzzle where no one really knows what the picture is supposed to look like when its finished. The film just seems to be an observation of how the politics and corruption of oil work. There are so many pithy lines about these politics that it would take a reprint of the screenplay to do justice to them.

Everybody, from the oil barons and power brokers, to the rich emirs and princes, to the CIA agents, to the poor oil field workers who get corrupted into becoming suicide bombers is neither a good or bad guy in this film; they’re all just doing what the politics make them into.

The extras on this disc aren’t that remarkable. There’s an eight-minute conversation with Clooney on how he had to gain 30 pounds to prepare for the role, along with learning how to speak in Arabic convincingly. There’s also a 10-minute mini-doc on how the cast and director hope the film will convince people out there to change their ways so that the world can change for the better, but they also acknowledge that they have to make those same changes themselves. And there’s five minutes of cut scenes, mostly of Clooney with his CIA wife.

Something that is remarkable is that the half the film is in Arabic languages. The Arabic characters speak English only when the situation calls for it: when they’re dealing with Americans. I thought that was a nice touch; most films have their characters speak in English even when they should be speaking in their mother tongues.

“Syriana” is neither a left- nor right-leaning film. The camera is just an observer of what’s going on in this world where no one really understands the whole thing; just their particular role in it. It’s the kind of film you probably should watch more than once, just to get what you missed the first time. And even then, you’ll probably still miss something.


Warner Bros., R, 128 minutes, $29.98

Roger Ebert review

Rotten Tomatoes review

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