We meet a lot of people very quickly in Syriana, and there aren't any strong connections among most of them.
Bob (George Clooney) is a CIA agent whose superiors don't know what to do with him. He has a tendency to cross the thin line between officially-sanctioned missions and rogue operations, and he's too outspoken to be put in a desk job where he can't be counted on to toe the party line when dealing with politicians. Bryan (Matt Damon) is an energy analyst, offering commentary on the cable networks and trying to help energy-rich countries make the most of their rapidly dwindling resources.
Bennett (Jeffrey Wright) is a corporate lawyer, tasked with investigating a potential merger of two oil companies, one of them his client, in hopes that he will find any improprieties that might exist before the Justice Department does. And Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) is heir to the throne, dreaming of modernizing his unnamed country and maximizing its revenues before the oil runs dry.
We're thrown right into all of their stories, and Gaghan doesn't waste any time filling in the background; we just have to grab as much info as we can from each scene, and trust that the missing details will be filled in later. They are, for the most part, and the characters (at least some of them) do find themselves more closely connected than we'd have guessed at first.
There's a large cast of fine actors on hand (Christopher Plummer, Amanda Peet, Tim Blake Nelson, William Hurt), and the performances are all very good, but the movie's message is ultimately so crude and simplistic -- Big Oil Bad; U.S. Government Worse -- that Syriana isn't so much a movie as it is a crude political rant. So desperate are US oil interests (private and public), we're told, that they will stoop to anything, including assassination, to keep the oil flowing in our direction. The movie is a heavy-handed preachy mess.
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