Syriana

 Syriana is a challenging film to watch.  Its title alone --- which I don't believe the movie ever directly addresses --- refers to the idea of people or countries molding other nation-states however they see fit, and the hubris behind such thinking.  As you might have guessed, this isn't a romantic comedy.

The plot behind Syriana, while comprehensible, is very complex, so I'm not going to waste any time detailing it.  It would take me forever and you wouldn't want to read it anyway, since this is a film where paying attention to the story is the only way not to get lost.  The basic idea is that the world dependency on foreign oil is bad for a number of reasons.  Way to take a stand, Hollywood.  It also addresses the need for oil states to develop their own identities, the effectiveness of the CIA, and the costs/benefits of high-level corruption.  What makes Syriana interesting is that it chooses to handle these issues simultaneously, so we can see how each issue impacts another.  You won't see how everything fits together for some time, as there are four storylines that exist largely independent of each other until the final quarter of the movie.  When they dovetail together, though, you are left with something to think about.  Or not.  One thing that everyone can agree on is that this is definitely not an action movie.

I did a Google Image search for "syriana action" and found this.

The cast of Syriana is shockingly noteworthy, although many of these actors do not get a whole lot of screen time.  George Clooney won his only Oscar for his role as a CIA agent who specializes in protecting American interests in the Middle East.  The big news with his performance here is that Clooney gained some weight and a beard to play the part; I don't know how much that impacts his character.  Was this an Oscar-winning performance?  Eh.  It's a fine effort among an ensemble cast, but I don't find it particularly outstanding.  Matt Damon is also fine as a consultant hired by the prince of the oil-rich emirate to make the nation more fiscally sound.  His character is also handling marital issues and a family tragedy, so Damon has the opportunity to show off some complex skills in this film; I thought he did a very good job, given the businesslike script.  Jeffrey Wright plays a lawyer that has been hired to smooth the way for an enormous oil company to merge with a smaller one that has cornered a key market; his job is convince the antitrust people that the merger is corruption-free.  I like seeing Wright in key supporting roles, but I thought his character here was a too void of emotions.  I never really had a sense of his character, and the recurring attempt to give him depth just felt clumsy.  Those are the big three, as far as characters in this movie go.  None of them are fascinating in their own right, but they are all quite believable as ordinary people that are good at their respective jobs.

This is not Ocean's 14

There is a fourth storyline that addresses the plight of immigrant workers in the Middle East and the allure of militant Islam.  Of the three actors in this story, only the missile-buying militant (Amr Waked) acts with any sort of regularity, and it shows.  The two innocent youngsters are played by two innocent actors without much more than half a dozen visible emotions between them.

And then there's the rest of the cast.  In George's storyline, William Hurt does his typical good acting thing as a confidant and Mark Strong plays a very very bad man.  Both roles are easily within the acting range of these men, but it was nice to see them handled so well.  In Damon's story, Amanda Peet plays his wife; while not a particularly strong role, she didn't screw it up, which is much better than Peet's leading roles.  I thought Alexander Siddig was very likable as the progressive-minded Prince Nassir, possibly the most positive portrayal of a Middle Eastern Muslim I have seen in years.  In Wright's story, Chris Cooper plays a domineering business owner with an abrasive personality (shocker!), Christopher Plummer is one of those white men who like to be the power behind the throne, David Clennon is interested in corruption, and Tim Blake Nelson plays a corrupt oilman.  Of all these capable actors, only Nelson delivers anything exceptional.  He gives a speech about corruption (he's unapologetically pro-corruption, by the way) that was the highlight of the movie for me.  I would show a video clip of his rant, but apparently nobody on the internet cares about TBN (as his buddies undoubtedly call him) laying some truth down on Jeffrey Wright.  I was able to find my favorite scene of his from O Brother, Where Art Thou? though:


This is a difficult movie to direct, I'm sure, and I thought that Stephen Gaghan did a respectable job here.  I do not believe he got any great performances out of his wealth of actors (with the exception of Nelson), but he did do a good job piecing this film together in a comprehensible whole.  He doesn't dumb down the story (which was loosely based on See No Evil, a memoir by an ex-CIA agent), instead choosing to overwhelm viewers with the plot.  That choice may alienate some viewers, and that's understandable.  Personally, I was able to follow along, even though I was irritated by his seemingly arbitrary choices on when to cut to another storyline, which storyline to cut to, and when to include a caption on the screen to indicate where it was taking place.  The film looks decent enough, although the camera work is nothing special.  That's not too surprising, since Gaghan is an award-winning writer, not a director; he co-wrote this movie, as well as Traffic.

As much as I appreciate what Syriana does right --- an interesting and relevant political story, interweaving plot threads, and moral shades of gray --- there are just too many things that it does wrong or simply avoids to make it a great movie.  The only character in the film that has a full character arc is Clooney's, and that development is mostly off-camera and is cut short.  There are so many characters and so little time given to them that it was hard to care about any.  I realize that, as a plot-driven "issue" movie, that isn't really the point of the film.  I also don't care.  There are three potentially interesting stories in this film (the terrorists-in-training one was predictable and dull) and all three had the acting talent to make them work.  The fact that this isn't an acting tour de force (or at least fun to watch) is almost criminal.  There are five Oscar winners involved with this movie, and the best scene features Tim Blake Nelson monologuing?  That makes no damn sense, and I like Nelson.

Not as much as Lisa does, though.

I also didn't find the story to be particularly revelatory.  Maybe I'm cynical, but the CIA trying to control foreign governments to get America what resources it needs sounds pretty accurate.  The stuff of bastards?  Sure.  But it makes sense, from a "me first and screw everyone else" point of view.  Nelson's speech was the only interesting take on these issues in the whole movie, and that's a shame because I think this could have been so much more interesting.  The whole story with Damon and Siddig had potential --- how to introduce political and socioeconomic change effectively within an orthodox Islamic culture has relevance, right? --- but didn't have enough time to develop on its own.  Clooney's CIA agent (with a heart of gold) could have had his own movie.  Wright's legal storyline takes on thriller overtones as soon as his boss starts playing king maker.  But when you squeeze these stories into one (well-edited, mind you) movie, they don't have room to grow.  Syriana has some great ideas in it, but the barrage of plot simply distracts you from the fact that you can't care for any of these characters.

2012

Director Roland Emmerich hates buildings.  I know what you're thinking.  "Whoa, whoa, whoa, Brian...Just because the guy directed 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, and Independence Day doesn't mean he hates buildings.  Maybe he just likes to direct insultingly stupid special effects movies."  Well, then, riddle me this: if he doesn't hate buildings, why did he write the screenplay for all those films?  Check and mate, Mr. Argumentative-voice-that-I-hear-in-my-head-as-I-type-this.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let's get to the movie.  Well, not so fast...did you see the poster?  The movie poster for the film has "We Were Warned" as a tag line.  Warned?  By who?  Okay, the movie is named 2012, and there is the famous Mayan Long Count calendar that starts with the date August 11, 3114 BC and ends with December 21, 2012 AD, so I'll assume that the Mayans warned us.  I have to assume this, because the movie only casually alludes to the Mayans a couple of times, never giving an in depth connection of how they knew the Mayans were warning us.  Alright, let's make that assumption.  What did they warn us about?  Presumably, since this is a disaster movie, the end of the world.  I'm not about to debate the merits of that idea (Well, maybe just for a second...my calendar ends on December 31, 2010.  Does that mean we all die on New Year's Eve?), but let's just assume that end of their calendar equals disaster.  The tag line implies that we are responsible, though.  "We Were Warned."  What?  "Don't let time continue in a linear fashion past December 20, 2012, or you'll be sorrrrrrryyyyyy!"  You'd think this preordained global event would tie in to nuclear war or global warming or dinosaur-killing asteroids, but no, not this film.  The earth just decides to go for humanity's jugular.  There are a lot of earthquakes, tidal waves (same idea, I know), and typhoons.  No tornadoes, oddly enough.  But "We Were Warned" that nothing humans did had any effect on the planet, and we were all just living on borrowed time.  We took out a loan from Mother Nature, and she's coming to collect on 12/21/2012...with interest!

Dear marketing team for 2012, I hate you so much.  Sincerely, Brian.

This movie could have also been titled "John Cusack: Faster Than Nature."  On four separate occasions, Cusack is being chased by a force of nature (an earthquake, volcano fumes twice, and a tidal wave) that tends to travel faster than a person, but apparently not John Cusack.  Don't get me wrong, I like John Cusack, but the man doesn't like being in good movies any more.  I also believe that, no matter how good a driver you are, you cannot drive a limousine through an office building that is falling down without crashing.  That's just my opinion, but I dare you to prove me wrong.


The plot to this masterpiece is pretty bare bones: the token scientist that everybody listens to (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) realizes that the world is going to end.  He and his friends have even calculated how much time we have left.  He tells the government, the government listens, and the governments of the world agree to secretly prepare some way to survive.  That's the plot. 

Reading that, you'd think this movie was 45 minutes long, but it clocks in at over two-and-a-half hours.  How do you fill all that extra time?  Well, Roland has the tried and true method of having one or two main characters, and the disaster happens, and it impacts the main characters and their loved ones.  In Independence Day, it was Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum; in The Day After Tomorrow, it was Dennis Quaid; in Godzilla, it was...um, I remember rooting for Godzilla, so she must have been the main character.  In 2012, the main characters are Ejiofor and Cusack.  How does that work out for their loved ones?  Let's see...Ejiofor fails to save his family or any of his friends, while Cusack's estranged family almost makes it through the film unscathed until his beloved replacement as husband and father (seriously, they really liked this guy) dies at the very end.  Don't feel bad for them; they just have Cusack fill in the newly vacant position.

The main idea in the film is the optimistic notion that, when all the chips are down, people are inherently good and will try to help each other because it is the right thing to do.  John Cusack's character wrote a (not terribly successful) book with that as its theme, and Ejiofor is reading the book.  The natural disasters occurring represent the tough times, and now it's time for humanity to save itself with its inherent goodness.  That's not a bad theme.  I don't necessarily disagree with it, either.  But every movie needs a villain, and in this movie it is Oliver Platt.  And nature, but nature has no dialogue.  Oliver Platt is the government guy who is trying to save the few thousand people he can in the time that Ejiofor gives him.  But Ejiofor's estimates are wrong every time (making him the worst movie scientist ever), which forces Platt's character to act aggressively to get the survival mission off the ground.  Don't get me wrong, Platt is a jerk in this film, but he's a logical jerk.  He does not try to save his 89 year-old mother because she's old and they will have to rebuild society if they survive; he allows rich people (instead of smart or genetically superior people) to pay billions of Euros for spots on the survival ships because the survival ships cost billions to make; when one of the survival ships can't be used, Platt chooses to not let them on board his ship because the final killer tidal wave will arrive in five minutes.  Is he a nice guy?  No, but his actions are understandable.  But Ejiofor has to make a swinging-for-the-fences-and-striking-out speech about how, if humanity is going to survive, it can't let go of its goodness, its...humanity.  And everyone but Platt totally agreed with him.  What?  Really?  Nobody says, "Let's try and get past this first extinction-level threat and then we can start being nice?"  Man, I must be ripe with villainy to think like that.

So how are the actors?  Well, the star of the show, Special Effects, was okay.  Buildings got destroyed.  Water rose.  Whatever.  Cusack was fine, but he needs a new agent.  Ejiofor was less good, but is generally a solid actor, so I'll give him a pass this time.  Cusack's son could be out-acted by lukewarm yogurt.  Amanda Peet and Thandie Newton are women; that's all the script really says about them.  Danny Glover looked really tired as the most depressing President of the United States ever...he's basically the anti-Bill Pullman in Independence Day; where Pullman had everyone fight back against annihilation, Glover just said "I quit, time to die."  Woody Harrelson plays a convincing crazy dirty hippie (he actually reminded me of my uncle in Montana, if my uncle was absolutely poo-flinging crazy), but it's still not a good role.  George Segal is in the movie for reasons that are never revealed.  There are some characters from China and India, too, but you're not supposed to care about them.

Really, that's the problem with this movie.  It spends so much time and effort (and did I mention time?) trying to make this feel epic, it has no room left for the characters.  And there are so many characters that just serve as cannon fodder to show how deadly the end of the world can be.  "Epic" means something with huge scope, but it always comes back to the characters.  Or, it's supposed to.

I give this film two stars for the effects, two stars for Cusack's charm, one star for Danny Glover not saying "I'm too old for this shit," and one star for killing George Segal, but I take away three stars for royally pissing me off.