Don't continue reading if you haven't seen Syriana yet.

After seeing Capote tonight, I snuck in to rewatch the last half-hour of Syriana. As I guessed it would after I first saw the film during Thanksgiving weekend, it makes much more sense the second time around. But more than that, since I (and, I think, the average moviegoer) was so busy trying to piece together the plot details the first time I saw the movie, I missed the horrifying emotional impact of the ending. I still believe adding ten or fifteen minutes to the running time would have made it a better movie, but I have much more respect for the outright ballsiness of Stephen Gaghan.

I'm almost convinced that Gaghan made the film confusing in order to obscure how radical the subject matter is to his financial backers and/or the American public. Think about what this movie does:

• It sympathesizes with a suicide bombing terrorist, humanizing his actions and motivations.
• It claims that private businesses, the Justice department, and other supposedly trustworthy American entities are outrageously corrupt and willing to break almost any law for the sake of financial profit.
• It claims that the American government is willing to perform secret and illegal assassinations -- and not for the sake of national security, but to enable the acquisition of scarce oil supplies for American private businesses, even when the stability of a Middle Eastern country is at risk.

This is radical stuff, and any congressperson who said the same on the record would find their political career immediately over. I'm glad that Syriana is second in the box office to Narnia and that millions of Americans will be seeing it, but it's unfortunate that most of them will only be viewing it once.

Syriana, a character-driven spy thriller about the political and financial machinations surrounding the international oil trade, is too taut for its own good. It's one of those movies where the filmmakers deliberately leave out information so that the viewer is aware of the conspiracy swarming around but can't quite figure out what it is and how each character is involved.

It reminded me of Roman Polanski's Chinatown, which is in the same family as Syriana, except the 70's classic dealt with the [local] implications of a [water] scandal rather than Syriana's international/oil subject matter. But Chinatown, with its highly-respected script by Robert Towne, manages the conspiracy far more professionally, cloaking in it in the guise of film-noir with Jack Nicholson as the chief investigator.

Syriana instead takes the approach of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic -- no coincidence since Syriana's writer/director Steven Gaghan was a co-writer of Traffic -- following several seemingly disparate storylines and various characters of different nationality/class/profession all at once. This technique worked well in the sometimes overly didactic Traffic, but falls a little short here, mostly because of the difficulty cramming it all in during the 126 minute running time, 21 minutes shorter than that of Traffic. While the overall sense of the conspiracy is mostly clear by the end of the film, we're not entirely sure how we and each character got there.

But perhaps this is just one of those movies that demand a second viewing (like, say, the first Mission: Impossible, which Robert Towne also wrote). Certainly all the other ingredients of the film are great: the acting (with good performances from George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, and Alexander Siddig - yes, there are no major female roles), the photography, the plot (when figured out), the subject matter, etc. Yet, I still have this feeling that this movie should've been great and came very close, especially when challenging movies with politically relevant subject matters are so hard to come by, and even more so from a major studio.