SYRIANA - stephen gaghan - 5.7 / 10

There's just way too much going on in this movie; it's trying to do more than any film, even a ten-hour miniseries, would be able to do. It's not a bad film per se, but because of the amount of stuff writer-director Stephen Gaghan is trying to cram into the film, there's just no room for little things like character development and plot clarity. The real shame of it is that a lot of the stuff that pushed those essential elements aside is beside the main point of the film. For instance, why make room for Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) and his wife's marital troubles? For that matter, why does Gaghan bother having Woodman's oldest son killed in a freak accident? It wastes a lot of screen time and doesn't add anything at all to the oil discussion.

There's also the matter of the overwrought names. The surnames of the two CEOs of the oil companies are Pope and Killen. There's also Bennet Holiday, a lawyer, and the aforementioned Bryan Woodman, an oil analyst. The names and subject matter cry out that this is a capital "I" important film and must be taken seriously. The problem (besides trying to discuss a very complex issue from all sides in less than three hours) is that the film isn't any fun and lacks any real forward momentum.

As the film slipped past the two-hour mark, I started to wonder what would signal the end. There hadn't, as yet, been any sort of coherent plot whose conclusion would lend the film some sort of climax, so I had no idea what was going to happen to signal the end of this "story." It turns out, unfortunately, that some late in the game violence and a tacked on emotional moment serve as the climax to this opus. But these are both cheap and out of left field and, until this climax came, I had quite forgotten that the people involved were even in the film at all.

That being said, you do have to give Gaghan and his team (especially George Clooney who packed on thirty extra pounds for no reason for his role as Bob Baer) credit for trying to make a popular film that has something to say about our modern world. And I suppose some of the credit for that goes to Mark Cuban (who put up the money to make it), which is pretty much just bananas.