The film stars an ensemble cast consisting of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet, Christopher Plummer, Alexander Siddig, and Mazhar Munir.

[5] As with Gaghan's screenplay for Traffic, Syriana uses multiple, parallel storylines, jumping among locations in Iran, Texas, Washington, D.C., Switzerland, Spain, and Lebanon.

The Emirate's foreign minister, Prince Nasir, has granted natural gas drilling rights to a Chinese company, greatly upsetting the U.S. oil industry and the U.S. government.

To compensate for its decreased production capacity, Connex initiates a shady merger with Killen, a smaller oil company that recently won the drilling rights to Kazakhstan's Tengiz Field.

His father, at the urging of the American government with the help of Whiting and his law firm, names the younger Meshal as his successor, causing Nasir to attempt a coup.

However, unaccustomed to the political discretion required, he quickly embarrasses the wrong people by speaking his mind and is sent back to the field with the assignment of assassinating Prince Nasir, whom the CIA misidentifies as being the financier behind the Egyptian's acquisition of the missile.

Barnes travels to Lebanon, obtains safe passage from a Hezbollah leader, and hires a mercenary named Mussawi to help kidnap and kill Nasir.

When the CIA learns that Mussawi plans to broadcast the agency's intention to kill Nasir, they set Barnes up as a scapegoat, portraying him as a rogue officer.

Woodman, having earlier offered his seat in Nasir's car to a member of the prince's family, survives the drone strike and goes home to his wife and remaining son.

Pakistani migrant workers Saleem Ahmed Khan and his son Wasim board a bus to go to work at a Connex refinery, only to discover that they have been laid off.

While playing soccer, they meet a charismatic Islamic fundamentalist, the same man who received the missing Iranian missile, who eventually leads them to use it while executing a suicide attack on a Connex-Killen tanker.

While investigating Connex-Killen's records, Holiday discovers a wire transfer of funds that leads back to a transaction between Texas oilman and Killen colleague Danny Dalton and Kazakh officials.

[7] Soderbergh bought the rights to See No Evil and negotiated the deal with Warner Bros.[10] Gaghan met Baer for lunch and then, for six weeks in 2002, the two men traveled from Washington to Geneva to the French Riviera to Lebanon, Syria and Dubai, meeting with lobbyists, arms dealers, oil traders, Arab officials and the spiritual leader of Hezbollah.

In addition, Gaghan dined with men suspected of killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and met with former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle.

[10] Gaghan has cited as influences on Syriana, European films like Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, Costa Gavras' Z, and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.

[11] Another influence, or resource—one that might also explain the movie's use of a documentary clip featuring John D. Rockefeller—is the fact that Gaghan's fashion-designer wife Minnie Mortimer is the great-granddaughter of onetime Standard Oil executive Henry Morgan Tilford.

In a December 2005 interview, Baer told NPR that the title is a metaphor for foreign intervention in the Middle East, referring to post-World War I think tank strategic studies for the creation of an artificial state (such as Iraq, created from elements of the former Ottoman Empire) that ensured continued western access to crude oil.

This land was part of the Fertile Crescent, and has historically been a geopolitically crucial junction for trade routes from the east, from Asia Minor and the Aegean, and from Egypt, and has long been a focus of great power conflicts.

The website's consensus states, "Ambitious, complicated, intellectual, and demanding of its audience, Syriana is both a gripping geopolitical thriller and wake-up call to the complacent.

Most critics stated that it was almost impossible to follow the plot, though some, notably Roger Ebert, praised precisely that quality of the film and offered an interesting hidden story possibility (a covert deal between the U.S. and China involving oil being shipped through Kazakhstan and passed off as coming from a different source).

When they get there, they will find not a conventionally satisfying movie but a kind of illustrated journalism: an engrossing, insider's tour of the world's hottest spots, grandest schemes and most dangerous men.

"[25] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "This is conspiracy-theory filmmaking of the most bravura kind, but if only a fraction of its suppositions are true, we—and the world—are in a world of trouble.

"[26] USA Today gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "Gaghan assumes his audience is smart enough to follow his explosive tour of global petro-politics.

"[27] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B−" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "it's also the kind of movie that requires a viewer to work actively for comprehension, and to chalk up any lack of same to his or her own deficiency in the face of something so evidently smart.

"[28] In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote: "If anything, Syriana tends to oversimplify a mind-bogglingly multifaceted problem that cannot so easily be resolved by a diatribe against the supposedly all-powerful 'Americans.