Syriana: The movie

Another Disturbing Affair

A dear friend of mine posted in the link above about the movie Syriana (The IMDB link is here). As he writes in his blog, it had a disturbing effect on him, which I too shared, and so I started to rewind the movie in my mind. The long time gap (a few months) smothered, perhaps, many small details but the overall impact of the movie has matured inside me, signs of a truly brilliant creation.

The brilliance of the movie lies in the story telling aspect, of which I believe the author, Robert Baer, of the original memoir-novel, See no Evil, should share the credit with writer-director Stephen Gaghan. Much has been reviewed, debated and said about the movie, but I would like to mention why I found the movie so enlightening and disturbing.

The movie has a multiple storyline narrative that lays bare the workings of the biggest of the mega corporates, i.e. the oil industry, and the other mega industry that affect the lives of this earth as profoundly as any other, the organization of the religious fundamentalist terrorists. The movie succeeds in depicting the carnivorous, rather cannibalistic, attitude of these two mega corps.

The global oil industry is supposed to be the epitome of the free market economy which is built on the premise of freedom and opportunity for all, and the religious fundamentalist regime of the middle-east is supposed to ensure a social structure that provides security and a universal umbrella to promote the goodwill of all with a more socialist set up. And what happens in reality is that they both feed on each other and lead the rest of the hapless inhabitants of the earth to destruction by ensuring a feudal set up which effectively ensures the confinement of power within the hands of a small minority. This minority doesn't compromise in spewing any venom on the society for their narrow minded individual profit and control of power. The oil industry and the 'powermongers' of the west remove the progressive movement in the middle east, in fear that there monopoly will be undermined, and the religious bigots develop the factory of jihadis to ensure their stronghold on the society by denying them any freedom of thought and philosophy.

Brilliantly told story which is enormously complex in its manifestation, this movie is disturbing for the sole reason that the end shows that the good is struggling hard and losing ground in this battle against evil, and there are enough compelling reasons that show that the current movement is perhaps irreversible. The eternal truth that we have been led to believe in our childhoods, the ultimate safe haven of our imagination, that good in the end triumphs over evil, will need much more complex battles to win to ensure that the struggle doesn't remain hopelessly lopsided........... and we have to really look hard into what minute roles we can fit, in this battle. An inconspicuous individual has no effect in these turns of events at this mega global scale, and this is what I find so disturbing, this inability to turn the tide.