The problem with Syriana was that it tries to present a picture of our current times without going into any detail; characters are expendable, and we don't know anything about any of them, even after its two hours running length. I think it would have been better had we spent an extra hour in the film, to actually get something out of these characters. We'll hear some music at one point, and the film builds momentum to something which doesn't happen, and it withers away into more surface detail.

A week after seeing Spielberg's (much worse) Munich, I said you know something's wrong when the only part you remember of a film in any detail is something as little as a knife going into somebody's head. With Syriana, there's a scene where Clooney gets his nails ripped out in a torture scene. It serves little purpose other than to give its audience some digestable sensationalism after an onslaught of complicated political rhetoric. It's a point proven, I think, by the resulting conversation I had with the two men I saw it with (one being my dad, the other his friend), how that scene in particular was awful. Without that scene, the film would have still worked and delivered its message, but we wouldn't have had anything to talk about. So it didn't need to be there.

It gives a sense of its characters being caught up in this harsh, political world, and being as expendable as the money they dish out to get power. Fair point; it succeeds in creating that kind of environment, but would have worked far better had there been some kind of emotional attachment to such expendable characters. Like the characters themselves, each storyline in the film is expendable. To the point where the death of a child is used as a plot device, just to make for some more political banter.

Clooney's part was the most interesting; tellingly, the film opens and closes with his storyline. That it is under-explored pays testament to the kind of width Gaghan tries to cover. Alas, the result is that we hover over a map, and never land to explore the jungles on it. Traffic handled this balance between a wider world while also working on an individual level brilliantly; as a further example, the final segment of The Lord of the Rings works even better.