Syriana

"Syriana" ia a movie by Stephen Gaghan who has also been the author for Stephen Soderberg´s "Traffic" in 2001. The style and the atmosphere of these two movies are very similar and prove that no one better in Hollywood thanGaghan has the talent to express the complexity of global political and economic relations in a movie.

Therefor these films stand in a line with other movies which dealt with global political themes in the last year, such as "The Interpreter" or "The constant Gardener". But as in "Traffic", "Syriana" gains its complexity through a cut-up of different plots, a mosaique of actions that take place in different parts of the world. In "Traffic" there were 3 levels: we saw the cop in Mexico fighting against drug-dealers (on the "producer-level"), cops in the USA fighting against the gangsters on the "consumer-level", and we saw the Senator fighting hopelessly against the organised drug-criminality while his own daughter is a Crack-junkie.

In "Syriana" there are even more levels and places (only to mention some of these places: Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Switzerland, Spain, different places in the USA ..). The single actions and persons finally make up a puzzle:
The old-fashioned CIA-agent (George Clooney) who becomes a victim of his own people, the corrupt Arabian Emir who prefers his business-relationships to political rationality, the leaders of the American oil-industry who do not have any scruples to implement their business-interests, a financial expert who becomes the manager of the Emir´s son, the unemployed young Pakistani oil-worker who gets in the hand of fundamentalist ideologists, the young Prince Nasir who wants to get his people to political sovereignity and who fails because of the will of the western oil-mafia.

All in all, this is not a movie that will make you feel happier. There is the hard torture scene in which Clooney loses two finger-nails. And it is the whole composition of the movie that gives you the depressive feeling (as in "Traffic") that a lot of things are going wrong in our world. Good that such movies are made today. And good that those movies still can win Oscars.