Syrianna

Kind of like Illiana, the combination of IN and IL. But no where near the midwest.

The strength of this film is visual, and the editing is minimalist. We are whisked from one scene to the next and made to put together the pieces. Now if you're a puzzle person you will like that. If you need things spelled out for you, this is not a good show. It is precicely, however, this type of editing that reflects the goals and ambitions of the project. We are kept engaged in a global spider web. We see bits and pieces of it, and very close up, and gradually we are drawn back until the entire web comes into focus. At first it looks like a few dewy, drippy lines of rope, and then when we get further back we see it for the huge trap that it is.

This is of course the filmmaker's view of politics. It's all tied together. But craftily they don't just want to spell it out for you. This does one of two things. We give up somewhere and proclaim "it's all too complex", or, and this is what makes the issues at hand compelling and believable (note that I'm not saying that the actual facts that are given to us are believeable in themselves), we come to the great "Ah hah!" that the story has been desigend to bring us to, and we therefore feel a great sense of personal discovery and enlightenment. This heightened state of involvement creates a buy-in for us. The buy-in is inclusive of Clooney's character, as we discover that he is an unwitting accomplice to destructive U.S. govt. policy and concurrent behavior; ergo, we side with him in his "quest for the truth". Dito with the Matt Damon character, and unwitting accomplace from the Swiss Banking end of the deal, and equally outraged at being used and abused, and wined and dined at the expense of his ethics. All of this is peachy if you buy into those kinds of politics. But of course who trusts their government any more, right? Since no one does it seems, we are open to this kind of thinking: the massive consipiracy. The reason that a film like this will succeed however, over and against a film like Farenheit 9/11, is because of it's understated agenda. It's much easier to buy into "fiction". We never feel as if we are being preached to in an action flick.

Very much in the vein of the original Manchurian Candidate, the gradual unfolding of the plot and the confidence we have in the hero of the story both lead us to the inexorable conclusion that all is not right with our current policy. We of course do not trust institutions that we rarely see the inside of or know of their policy, so the movement within the CIA, in particular by it's biggest directors and action figures, is belieable. We either believe that what they are doing is actually OUTSIDE the knowledge of the chiefs of staff or the presidency, or that somehow the upper management knows of it and is purposefully not directly involved, either way implicating a strong government involvement in direct manipulation of a foreign power's political choices, and all of that resultant from commercial concerns. The differnce between this film and the Manchurian Candidate would be that in the Candidate the manipulation takes place in the foreign power with designs on our own. You know, Candidate was banned for quite some time. I saw no smoke about this from any DC based committees...

Devil's Advocate Note:
Well, it certainly was a sad trip. The "good guys" get killed in the end, and all by our dear military. We are supposed to feel saddened by our own greed and licentiousness, and, according to the commercial at the end, start making an immediate gravitation away from our dependence on oil. We've got to stop encouraging the Arabs to just put up hotels and theme parks with their money and allow them to start building for the future without an oil based economy! That's what we're doing now folks: playing the whore and taking Vegas to them and not teaching them the value of savings! Without a fair shake from us now we will just be taking their money and leaving them with multimillion dollar roller-coasters and no electricity to run them with! Then where will they be, huh? You can't eat a roller-coaster! These poor ignorant Arabs can't think for themselves, so we've got to stop our government manipulation on levels like this! I'm so damned fired up about this I'm just liable to go jump in my SUV and ride right down to my congressman's headquarters, take him out to lunch, and give him a wake up call! So outbid the Chinese and give them what they need over there! Schools, and clinics, and football!