Never having met George Clooney, I can't comment on his personality. He did once show up at a high-class restaurant, where my then-girlfriend was a hostess, and proceed to call her "doll," which admittedly has the assholish reek of someone acting like it's the 20s. I'm not inclined to look for reasons to dislike the guy, though, when he's made such a concerted, and mainly successful, effort over the last decade to appear consistently in good movies; such deliberateness has an endearing affect. "Syriana," incidentally, is no exception. Clooney's dumpy CIA operative Bob Barnes is but one element in writer/director Stephen Gaghan's remarkably layered and complex look at the contemporary geopolitics of the petroleum industry.
Gaghan here uses the same approach as "Traffic" (which he wrote), following a cog in every level of an intricate machinery that, far too powerful to be controlled by any one, ruthlessly disposes of them when they get in the way. As much as the execs of the future Connex-Killeen, whose proposed merger is being investigated by the Justice Department, or the young Saudi royal, or the CIA, try to exert control over arguably the most important industry on the planet, the main character here is oil itself. It dictates the terms of the creation of the world's 29th largest economy out of a business merger, determines royal lines of succession, and even ultimately decides who lives, and who dies.
Yet "Syriana" isn't ENTIRELY cynical; Matt Damon's energy adviser and his client, the possible future Saudi ruler, talk excitedly about the potential for oil rights to modernize society and help its downtrodden. Clooney's Barnes allows himself to be thrown back into the struggle in part to atone for a deadly mistake from an earlier assignment that still haunts him. But these are individual flashes of idealism and conscience, and are no match for the profit and power potential of the industry.
The message is that alternative energy movements will never be fully successful until every last drop of oil has been burned away. It's no secret to "Syriana"'s players that the global oil supply has begun to dwindle, it's simply irrelevant. Oil is power, and as long as it's there, someone has to control it. Better us, thinks everyone in the film, than the other guys. "Syriana"'s portrait is a depressing one, but it's hard not to think that it speaks a lot of truth.
Gaghan here uses the same approach as "Traffic" (which he wrote), following a cog in every level of an intricate machinery that, far too powerful to be controlled by any one, ruthlessly disposes of them when they get in the way. As much as the execs of the future Connex-Killeen, whose proposed merger is being investigated by the Justice Department, or the young Saudi royal, or the CIA, try to exert control over arguably the most important industry on the planet, the main character here is oil itself. It dictates the terms of the creation of the world's 29th largest economy out of a business merger, determines royal lines of succession, and even ultimately decides who lives, and who dies.
Yet "Syriana" isn't ENTIRELY cynical; Matt Damon's energy adviser and his client, the possible future Saudi ruler, talk excitedly about the potential for oil rights to modernize society and help its downtrodden. Clooney's Barnes allows himself to be thrown back into the struggle in part to atone for a deadly mistake from an earlier assignment that still haunts him. But these are individual flashes of idealism and conscience, and are no match for the profit and power potential of the industry.
The message is that alternative energy movements will never be fully successful until every last drop of oil has been burned away. It's no secret to "Syriana"'s players that the global oil supply has begun to dwindle, it's simply irrelevant. Oil is power, and as long as it's there, someone has to control it. Better us, thinks everyone in the film, than the other guys. "Syriana"'s portrait is a depressing one, but it's hard not to think that it speaks a lot of truth.