A few weeks after 9/11, director Steven Soderbergh sent Stephen Gaghan, who’d written the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Traffic, a copy of former CIA officer Robert Baer’s memoir, “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the C.I.A.’s War on Terrorism.” What followed was a tour d’horizon of the Middle East for Gaghan, led by Baer, and the movie Syriana, which Gaghan wrote and directed.
Released in November 2005, Syriana was the first U.S. motion picture to grapple with the full complexity of the forces America was manipulating and contending with in the Middle East as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan turned into occupations. There was oil, of course, and much money to be made, but ideology was also at work on all sides, from the hearing rooms of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (in Syriana, the Committee to Liberate Iran) to the ramshackle extremist religious schools of the Gulf. Even the most powerful nodes in these webs often had little idea what was really happening on the ground, or how their decisions might reshape the region.
Like Traffic, Syriana makes the complexity of the situation its defining principle and cynicism its philosophical outlook. Viewed 20 years later, it nevertheless stands out for its attempt to explain and critique, a stance that GWOT films would come mostly to drop, falling into either the trite jingoism of American Sniper or the nihilistic realism of Warfare.
Jack, Evan and Imran discuss Syriana’s many strong points — including Robert Elswit’s sneakily impressive cinematography — where it fits into the long lineage of conspiracy films, and just how Gaghan would end up going from this to Dolittle.
Be sure to follow Imran: https://x.com/i_zzzzzz
Evan: https://x.com/evanhill
And Jack: https://x.com/jscros
Produced by: https://x.com/notoriouslghtng
