Syriana

One of those movies you need to see more than once to understand...and yet you really can't be arsed.

What did Clooney get his Oscar for? Growing a beard and buying his wardrobe at Wal Mart?

The format is Traffic meets Tom Clancy, and features an ensemble of macho, morally-blinkered types strutting their stuff in the knowing world of realpolitik. None are especially interesting from a pyschological point of view. Traffic had a central female figure, Syriana has none.

There are the usual scenes of groups of people getting in an out of darkened SUVs and walking briskly along corridors to a menacing Arabian drum beat.

Roger Ebert says that he enjoyed the feeling the movie gave of being located within a web − aware of the surrounding connections, some concrete, others half-formed or broken − and yet never quite lost.

"Since none of the characters understand the whole picture, why should we?" he enthuses; the convolution is itself a kind of explanation. I'd like to say I agree with him, but I can't. This labyrinth is rather one-dimensional.

His review did have this interesting definition though: "A recent blog item coined a term like "hyperlink movie" to describe plots like this. The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another. "