Movie Review: Syriana
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What Parents Should Know
This movie isn't for kids as the plot and themes are too
complex and mature. Parents should know it includes several
disturbing scenes, including the accidental
electrocution/drowning of a young boy in a swimming pool
(including the mother's distress); a torture scene in which a
character's fingernails are pulled out; and a CIA missile
strike against a car convoy (explosion and aftermath featuring
bloody, burning bodies). The film focuses in part on a CIA
agent who orchestrates assassinations; U.S. oil company
executives and lawyers also conspire to arrange violence; and a
young Pakistani becomes a suicide bomber (last pictured as he
heads toward a U.S. ship). Characters curse, drink, and
smoke.
Families can discuss the interrelationships between personal/moral and public/ political decisions. How are government and corporate policies linked and at odds? How are the several father-and-son relationships like and unlike each other? Does Bob's seeming effort to save Prince Nasir affect your opinion of his work as a CIA agent?
Common Sense Media Review
Complicated and intelligent, SYRIANA focuses on multiple
storylines involving corporate and official energy deals, and
various sorts of betrayals. The film is built on fine
performances and difficult positions, a mature, provocative
look at global machinations performed by small-minded men.
The movie's moral center is Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a veteran CIA agent who's recently begun to doubt the morality of his work. When Bob's bosses at Langley decide that he's off his game, they worry. They need to keep him in play; he knows too much ("He's gotta stop with the memos"). To cut losses, they make a strategic, expedient choice: they'll deplete Bob until he's dead.
Inspired by See No Evil, a 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, Syriana thrillers -- where the good man rebels against his evil government employers -- in fact, Bob's moral dilemma is not so easily sorted. He's not a conventionally good man, but a desperate, dedicated, and eventually, broken one.
When Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) makes an oil deal with China instead of the U.S. company Connex, Bob's bosses send him to oversee the young sheik's assassination. Connex moves to merge with the smaller Killen, owned by Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper), which now has drilling rights in Kazakhstan. Pope is an old-school Texas oilman ("My daddy was a wild-catter, nobody ever gave me shit"), and used to getting his way. The merger will make the two companies, together, the world's fifth largest oil and gas company (which translates to the 23rd largest GNP, that is, humungous).
The shift to Chinese ownership has far-reaching effects, of course, including worker layoffs in the Gulf. When Pakistani migrant Ahmed Kahn (Shahid Ahmed) and his son Wasim (Mazhar Munir) lose their work permits, the younger man and his best friend Farooq (Sonnell Dadral) seek ways to act on their anger and frustration, becoming grim case studies in the making of suicide bombers. As the film's tagline has it, "Everything is connected."
