I remembered one of the question at yahoo.answer asked about the oil in the Middle East and American politics when finally I saw this movie. Questioned the American position of the Middle East Oil Business.

The movie did not answer it all, but it was interesting to watch the beliefs of fanatical people, the greedy people, the oil and the politic connected one in another this movie.

How the decision could change people’s life, destroyed the good one and left the bad one. How the fanatical beliefs made a father lost his son, washed the brain of the poorest one to become a martyr for nothing.

Finally I had the picture of the fanatical people who destroyed my country, Indonesia , who destroyed their own people …

Anyway, the picture was beautiful, especially at the last part, take my breath away.

This is a hard movie …don’t watch is just for fun. I think I have to watch it once again to get the “main” message.

In a similar way that Stephen Gaghan adapted a British miniseries into Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, he does a similar thing with the complicated political story of Syriana. It strikes a balance between a rant about politics and oil and a thriller, and it worked for me. But it’s probably a personal thing, but I enjoyed it and was even surprised by it. It’s very well-shot and wisely avoids large chunks of exposition and focuses on the characters and the gaps where we can fill in the blanks. A solid film, but not something to see if you don’t want to think or pay close attention.

Okay, it’s flawed, definitely. I think there’s a lot that could’ve been done to make this movie better.

I disagree with some earlier entries written about it. I think there was plenty of character development, given that you can’t really make a character-driven movie that is plotted this way – unless you make it a miniseries. It was a bit hard to notice because the plot was foremost, but it was obvious to me that the main sympathetic characters were not just “stock”. Some of them had (at least) conflicting interests, internal warring, etc.

I did not feel that the movie gave the impression that the rich and powerful are all to blame. Rather, I really felt convicted as a relatively ignorant consumer of oil. Certainly, I was appalled at the amount of power and money being thrown around. But I felt that the implicit point (not explicitly stated in the movie, that I remember) was that we as consumers simply do not know what is involved with procuring and ensuring the supply of the petroleum that we’ve come to depend on – and that we would rather not know. Because it’s a complicated, painful, dirty business. Maybe not as dirty as the movie suggests. I don’t doubt it’s exaggerated – the movie does have an agenda after all. But it makes me wonder – how DOES the oil industry work, then? And why don’t I know anything about it? And given the amount of money involved, can we really trust people in power to tell the truth about what actually happens in the course of procuring and distributing oil?

The American consumer don’t appear in the movie, but it would have been a good thing to put us in there, somehow. Throwing out bushels of plastic containers, wasting fuel by driving 2 blocks to pick up fast food…too bad they couldn’t come up with a subplot involving the consumer. Because where the hell else is all of that oil going?

What I really got from this movie: the sense that the average American really does not get it (what our relationship to the Mideast truly is), or chooses not to get it. Because it’s dry, boring, hard to understand, etc. Difficult to sum up in a 2 minute TV news bit. Painful to contemplate.

Watch it. You might not get it, so watch it again. You don’t have to agree with it by any means, but at least let it raise some questions for you…

Though I enjoyed this movie, I thought that overall, it was a half baked effort. So much more could have been put into character development, and would have balanced out its propagandist agenda.

very good. although i will admit to having a hard time following the multiple, concurrent storylines that are played out in this movie. i would suggest seeing it twice if you can.

Just saw Syriana this afternoon. I really enjoyed it. It was kind of hard to follow all the threads but was big on cinema and impactful moments. Kind of a collage. My politics lean left which seemed sympatico with this movie. And yet there were complexities and realism that made it not just a simplistic depiction of the bad corporate energy interests.

racist james bond type trash that oversimplifies and stereotypes, but for today’s political crises. and with a contemporary aesthetic. on the other hand, healthy, cynical materialist perspective that kind of requires and produces the cultural and political stereotypes . . .

Very Interesting and a little slow and dry.

A very interesting movie, but a little slow early on. George Clooney is excellent.

The most annoying thing about the movie is how it reduces such complex topic of oil & politics down to just greed and corruption amongst the people in power – which might be completely accurate – but there was no need for a 2-hour movie to tell us that. But the feeling after seeing the movie is that it’s all the rich and powerful’s fault, while we’re all innocent consumers doing nothing wrong, which might be just the thing us over-consuming Americans need to hear to sleep better at night.

I thought this movie pretty much sucked. To me, it seemed pretentious, stereotypical, slow, and worthless to mankind. There was nothing terribly offensive about it, but it also has nothing going for it… therefore the spitting out is called for.