Not intimidated to say I liked Syriana and much else besides involving Clooney, so there. Burn Before Reading is a screwball comedy. There is no requirement to view it as an endorsement of incompetence theory in all things CIA. It's more a light touch on the (middle class) human condition. Men Who Stare at Goats is more problematic. Its heart may have been in the right place at some point but it ends up as an upbeat comedy about Abu Ghraib, not funny. Very much appreciated Good Night and Good Luck.
Here were my thoughts on Syriana, from Old RI, where it is apparently impossible to link to individual posts:
JackRiddler wrote:.
Syriana sprawls over multiple plotlines in a way that was criticized as too complex or didactic for a movie, but I liked it. It circumscribes the machinations of the CIA and financial actors around the merger of two giant oil companies and a related power struggle for control of a fictional Gulf principality. Future oil depletion is among the themes cited in the geostrategic justifications for various actions, but without a definitive statement for or against the idea of peak oil. It's made clear that the dominant motive for most of the key players is a combination of greed and narcissistic self-advancement.
Two attacks occur at the end, both of which would be classified as terrorism in the current reckoning.
One is a "genuine" suicide attack by young men who have been pushed into jobless desperation and who have chosen fundamentalist religion as their organizing principle for resistance. They use a US missile that was sold to a different cell earlier in a botched CIA sting operation. However, the missile's warhead is delivered at the prow of a small boat crashing into a tanker facility.
The second is a straight-up CIA assassination of the nationalist leader who is trying to overthrow the corrupt elites allied with American interests (and, if I remember, seeking a deal to supply China). He is kept under constant surveillance by satellite and killed by a missile shot from a drone plane.
Both of these scenarios reflect events that have happened in real life. I felt there was a cop-out at the end in not showing what would have surely followed: an official attribution of responsibility for the attacks as conveyed by the mass media. All that was missing to complete the film's "map" was 10 seconds of CNN in the background reporting that the two attacks in the nation of ____ bear the hallmarks of al-Qaeda, "including the use of sudden, simultaneous strikes," using the familiar footage of Bin Ladin and his followers hoisting rifles in the desert.
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