SYRIANA
I watched a very insightful and thought provoking film the other night. On the face of it, Syriana, an Academy Award-winning film starring American actor George Clooney, starts off about Oil, and ends up about Gas. But ultimately, maybe, it’s about Energy, and thus, Power, and who wields it, and the secret places they wield it from.
The film pans out across disparate locations around the globe, unconnected like random points of light viewed from space. Iran. China. Geneva, Switzerland. The United States (of course). Russia. Marbella, Spain. Holiday resort, or a good place to do deals? The film skips about and confuses the viewer, but maybe it’s just that we live in a confusing world, where the locus of responsibility is hard to pin down, and this film just embraces that reality.
Corporate mergers. Shell companies and dodgy accounting practices. Warring royal factions in the Middle East. CIA intervention. Hizbollah. Beirut. Assassinations and internal investigations. Derivatives trading. Peak Oil and Pipelines. Madrassas. Suicide Bombers. Take your shiny corporate coin and flip it to reveal the dark reality of our growing dependency on a world that even the Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t understand anymore…
And so on one level it may never make sense to us how “radical” Islam could drive a young Pakistani boy into seeking illumination in the path of an LNG tanker. And what use a double-hull against the best American-made weaponry? Is this what the intelligence community means by “Blowback”?
But squint your eyes and the vast, floating bomb you witness at the end of this chilling film could well be destined for, or even moored in Milford Haven, and then you’ll realise the real truth, tucked between the multilayered sheets of this revealing clever film.
That Syriana is here too. It’s everywhere.
Watch this film.
The film pans out across disparate locations around the globe, unconnected like random points of light viewed from space. Iran. China. Geneva, Switzerland. The United States (of course). Russia. Marbella, Spain. Holiday resort, or a good place to do deals? The film skips about and confuses the viewer, but maybe it’s just that we live in a confusing world, where the locus of responsibility is hard to pin down, and this film just embraces that reality.
Corporate mergers. Shell companies and dodgy accounting practices. Warring royal factions in the Middle East. CIA intervention. Hizbollah. Beirut. Assassinations and internal investigations. Derivatives trading. Peak Oil and Pipelines. Madrassas. Suicide Bombers. Take your shiny corporate coin and flip it to reveal the dark reality of our growing dependency on a world that even the Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t understand anymore…
And so on one level it may never make sense to us how “radical” Islam could drive a young Pakistani boy into seeking illumination in the path of an LNG tanker. And what use a double-hull against the best American-made weaponry? Is this what the intelligence community means by “Blowback”?
But squint your eyes and the vast, floating bomb you witness at the end of this chilling film could well be destined for, or even moored in Milford Haven, and then you’ll realise the real truth, tucked between the multilayered sheets of this revealing clever film.
That Syriana is here too. It’s everywhere.
Watch this film.
