Cinema World
Tour, Film #120
Country: United Arab Emirates (only partially produced and shot there)
Political Cinema, Film #1
Rating: 8/10
Watched in: Cairo, Egypt
Since years already this film has been waiting on my watchlist to be watched. I'm studying political science, currently the focus is on International Relations. Not
only that, I'm extremely interested in geopolitics and Middle Eastern politics and conflicts – I spend a lot of my free time to read on these topics.
Nevertheless, I found this film extremely hard to follow. Many other people complained that they had the same problem. Not because of the topic, but rather due to
the fact that Syriana is based on ex-CIA agent's Robert Baer's book See No Evil and the screenwriters stayed very close to it. When books get adapted, it's
extremely important to find a narrative structure that fits the medium of the film. A brilliant example for that is McKay's The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis, which
finds ingenious solutions to explain complex economic and political processes. Syriana doesn't explain a lot and many events and persons are purely fictional, so you won't know
anything of what happens in the film. I strongly recommend re-reading the film's plot afterwards on Wikipedia, I didn't understand for example the connection of Iran, Egypt and Dubai through the missing missile.
All that being said, I definitely want to put out there that this is nonetheless a great and extremely relevant film. Syriana doesn't reproduce
one-dimensional Hollywood stereotypes, but approaches its topics with clear and analytical professionality. It points out extremely well how all incidents are connected with each other and how a
few rich old men in the United States control the lives of workers all around the globe.
That's why the story of the Pakistani work immigrants - who lose their jobs because of the fusion of the companies in the United
States and consequently get radicalised in fundamentalist-extremist circles – is so important. Syriana explains on a remarkably intellilgent and intellectual level how religious
fanatism and violence isn't “in the Arab's / Muslim’s blood“, how conservative media wants to make us believe, but that the terror is actually actively produced by the US' foreign policies. The
film introduces us to the older son of the Emirati Emir, Prince Nasir, and presents him as a downright man with democratic and progressive ideas, but he doesn't act according to the plans of
influential oil magnates with anti-democratic connections to corrupt CIA authorities. That's why they try to use Clooney's character Bob Barnes to eliminate him.
The “War on Terror“ and “Pax Americana“ (a term in political sciences which describes the fight for international democracy and peace overseen by the US) don't
produce more democracy, on the contrary: most US foreign policies back the country's corporates' economic interests. US elites portray the Middle East as an inhumane region so that they can shape
and exploit it according to their interests – that's what the film's title, Syriana (a term used by Washington elites' think-tanks to describe a hypothetical re-shaping of the
Middle East), refers to.
All the thoughts mentioned above just scratch the surface - Syriana is a shockingly underrated film I could write hours about. I can definitely see
why this film got little recognition and still has dramatically low interactions, even here on Letterboxd. The film is for many audiences simply too complicated and approaches (extremely
relevant!) topic which are unfortunately not trending. But as George Clooney said in his acceptance speech for the (derserved) Oscar he received for Syriana:
“We are a bit out of touch in Hollywood- once in a while. It's probably a good thing – we're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered and we talked about Civil Rights when it wasn't really popular. We bring up subjects.“
- not explicitly saying it, but obviously referring to the film's topic of dangerous US foreign policies – just shortly after the unjust Iraq War led by Bush and Cheney. Even though not so many people watch these kind of films (Vice, Citizenfour/ Snowden, etc.), they're relevant and bring up topics which are not sufficiently discussed nowadays.
After this long review just a few more words why I chose this film for my Cinematic World Tour: it doesn't really meet the
criterias of my list of every
country's best film, but first of all, large parts of the film were shot in the United Arab Emirates, which supported the production of this film. Furthermore, Arabic and Urdu (one of Dubai's
most-spoken languages!) are frequently spoken in the film. And most important of all, better than no other film, this draws an interesting and extremely informative picture of the
UAE.
Having just visited all 7 Emirates last month myself, my memory of them is still quite fresh and I found myself very surprised how accurately and
precisely Syriana summarizes the essence of the country. No aspect is left out – the oil, the work immigrants in precarious working conditions, some progressive ideas and the
culture of eagles and birds. But extremely interesting was that the film predicted long before the Emirates' transformation into a tourist hotspot that the country has to change its economical
perspectives in order to keep its wealth. Matt Damon's character says this to the progressive Prince a few times throughout the film. And funnily enough, that's exactly the strategy which the UAE
pursued: as the oil's running out and most of it's in Abu Dhabi anyway, Dubai changed it's strategy and aimed to become the regions most important tourist and shopping destination. Still, there
are many problems, which are also adressed in the film, especially that the magic behind Dubai's rise out of the sand is sadly millions of cheap work immigrants from less developped
countries.
All this makes Syriana a film I'd highly recommend watching, to inspire you to read and learn more about the geopolitics of the world. The film is flawed, yes, but I'd wish more films like these were made nowadays, not only “once in a while“.
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