Much of the crew from George Clooney's Good Night And Good Luck carries over to Stephen Gaghan's Syriana - producer Steven Soderbergh and the Section 8 shingle, cinematographer Robert Elswitt, Clooney himself - and so too does the sense of righteous indignation which buoyed that film beyond the level of mere historical reenactment and which emerges as the crystal clear throughline of this overly intricate cacophony of economics and foreign policy. This is a contagiously angry picture.

It's also a definitively labyrinthine one: Gaghan recently told the LA Times that he had to paper his house with note cards to keep the plot in order, a luxury he actually extends to one of the characters in the film and which the audience will probably envy. This isn't really a point of contention, mind you; he'll be criticized for being oblique, but I, for one, am far happier playing catch-up then being force fed expository conspiracy theory. I couldn't quite tell you how every single character falls into place in relation to each other and the narrative's conflict any more than I could actually list all of them (there are about 70 speaking parts), but I'm happy to give Gaghan the benefit of the doubt and assume he's done his research. And I don't think he's presuming to be more intelligent then his audience, nor does he expect audiences to be able to completely follow these machinations he's devised; all that one really needs to be aware of going into Syriana is the possibility (or, rather, the fact) that the line between foreign policy and the oil business is growing ever finer. At this precise point in history, it's hard not to be aware of that, if not infuriated by it

Which of course is why Gaghan (who previously won an Oscar for writing Traffic for Sodebergh) made the film in the first place. This incensed sensibility brings about a very interesting and unsettling phenomenon, and while it's something very much worth discussing, it does require that I disclose the ending of the film. So consider the film recommended, and consider returning to this review after you've seen it.

Of the film's parallel narratives, there are three that are ostensibly the primary threads, based around George Clooney's aging, idealistic CIA operative; Jeffrey Wright's corporate attorney; and Matt Damon's conflicted, opportunistic financial analyst. All three strands are bound by the big oil merger that is the root of the film, and there are multiple ancillary shoots intertwine with them. Then there's another story instigated by the merger, which Gaghan keeps separate from the rest: it concerns two youths who are recruited into a terrorist training camp in Egypt after being dismissed from their jobs in the oil fields. Most of the characters in the film seem to be fighting for screen time, but the scenes with these boys are simple and relaxed when they intermittently occur; as a result, their inevitable transformation from normal teenagers to suicide bombers is eerily swift and understated, to the point that they themselves barely seem to have realized what's happened until it's too late.

What happens is that, just as the newly merged corporate monstrosity celebrate their resumed presence in the Gulf, a boat laden with explosives is driven into the pipeline. This serves as an underscore to simultaneous act of calculated terror, this one enacted by the CIA in the name of foreign policy that leaves some of the film's few admirable characters dead or seriously disillusioned. The parallels are obvious, of course, but here's where the film gets tricky. Gaghan orchestrates these dual attacks in concert with a third sequence, a party for 'Oil Man Of The Year' at which all the corporate bigwigs, whose hands are, as far as Gaghan's concerned, demonstrably in the government's pockets, sip cocktails and give self-congratulatory speeches about how much profit they're making. Their callous cajoling, juxtaposed as it is with death and destruction, is explicitly constructed to draw ire from the audiences, to fire up that same sense of indignanation that Clooney achieved through similar (if less bombastic) means in Good Night And Good Luck - and indeed it does. It is so successful a manipulation, in fact, that it makes a triumph out of the terrorist attack. A vengeful triumph, certainly, and a terrible one; but a triumph nonetheless.

Is this appropriate? I think it is. The film's structure is solid enough to support such a provocation, and indeed is perhaps better for it; it is this element of violent and uncertain flux, I think, that saves the film from ending on a note of resigned dislliusionment. It is certainly not a pro-violence picture, and Gaghan is certainly not condoning terrorism - in fact, I'm not completely sure that this wasn't simply an unintentional side effect of a very intentional comparison - but I think he is inferring that the imperfect but well-intentioned America represented by Damon, Clooney and Wright's characters has been overrun by Big Oil, Big Business, and the Small Government they control, and that this has become something of an elephant in the back room. What will it take to get people to confront it? The United States Gaghan represents in Syriana is one that needs to be brought to its knees and dealt a reprimanding blow, a perspective which will be perceived as either inexcusable or extremely patriotic.