"Syriana" serves as the name of a fictional Middle East country, and is used as a metaphor of how oil drives the foreign policy of the wealthiest nations. It is a chillingly timely film whose story could be drawn from the headlines of any major daily newspaper. Many of the behind the scenes fictionalized events have a sense of ringing truer than we would like to believe.

Robert Barnes (George Clooney) is a government operative who’s had plenty of overseas spy experience. He’s a patriot who works in the field. Like our men and women in uniform, the people who take the greatest risk and are usually in the position to "pull the trigger" are the ones with the smallest paychecks.

Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is an energy analyst and a partner in a firm that brokers oil. He’s a hot commodity who pontificates on the top rated financial shows about oil futures. He and his wife Julie (Amanda Peet) live in Syriana with their two young children.

When two American companies attempt to form a merger to secure more oil for the US, they meet stiff competition from China. At the same time tragedy strikes the Woodman family while they are on a business mixed with pleasure trip, as guests of an Arab sovereign. This affects what Bryan is willing to do regarding in-depth involvement with an oil rich country. The behind the scenes maneuvering on how and why power changes hands gives some insight as to how a Bin Laden and a Saddam Hussein, people we would tend to think would be friends united against the USA, can become bitter enemies.

While some will think the film is a thinly veiled swipe at the foreign policy of George W. Bush, they are wrong. It’s a major slap to US foreign policy that is rooted in what’s best for the major stockholders of US companies, with the trade-off being it’s presumably what’s good for the world as a whole. The subject is oil and the wrongdoers are a string of Presidents dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, with no one left out between then and now, whether they were Democrats or Republicans. It’s the powerbrokers who have high price lobbyists that own our presidents, not the American people.

Buried in the film is a message of economic morality. The moral compass may rest in the dilemmas faced by a corporate lawyer, Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), who also tackles a personal challenge familiar to many of us.

The story has many of the facts featured in the politically astute Chalmers Johnson book "Sorrows of Empire." Admittedly, here they are combined with a fair amount of melodrama. While it’s easy to look reproachfully at the evildoers of the drug trade ("Traffic"), to face the consequences of US policy with respect to oil is much more uncomfortable. Who among us does not want something done about $50 auto fill ups and home heating bills enough to make you think you are buying a round trip airfare to Europe?

The film unfolds with the style and drama of a Tom Clancy novel, with one key exception. The doomsday scenario detonates one stick of dynamite at a time rather than an explosion that ends the world in a single moment.

Some movie goers, looking for a casual "I want to escape" outing, may find the film too complex and close to reality because it gives you a lot of information and facts along with plenty of action without telling you who is good or bad. It’s easy to enjoy but the only way you can decide what it all means is to think about what has been presented and reach you own conclusion.

Like other recent movies on understanding how wars are fought and why people will sacrifice themselves for the "greater good," it’s admirable to see a film like this that lays it on the line. This is a not to be missed political thriller that focuses on current events well beyond docu-drama facts.