To those in the States, such words and images may conjure a sensation of unspeakable otherness: suddenly, the Middle East becomes a place in which all natural ties can be suspended in favor of a fanatical devotion to a religion we do not understand. The bond between mother and child, the innate feeling of protectiveness we harbor towards the young and the weak, and even the instinct of self-preservation—all are violated by the cult of the suicide bomber. It is easy for an observer to make the leap from complete “other” to complete “evil,” to utterly condemn not only the deeds but the people who execute them. I know I did.

Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) challenges such thinking by presenting the story of Wasim, a young man who falls into the hands of a terrorist organization. The film invites us to sympathize with Wasim by portraying him as a seeker of substance. When we first see Wasim, he is climbing power lines for recreation. His agile frame, silhouetted against the blue sky, seems to symbolize the search of many like him for something greater, something higher. Later on in the film, he takes a job as an oil worker and, after being laid off when the company he works for changes hands, joins a Muslim school where he falls under the tutelage of a sweet-talking, blue-eyed Egyptian. At the school, Wasim receives both the physical and spiritual sustenance he has been lacking. There, he is encouraged and strengthened in his faith.

Yet it soon becomes clear his Egyptian mentor is using the school as a recruitment ground for suicide bombers. He has his students watch a videotape in which a terrorist, speaking to the camera, describes how he wants his funeral to be arranged. In this way, the Egyptian encourages the young men to indulge in the ultimate narcissistic fantasy, imagining one’s own funeral. He singles Wasim out for special guidance, telling him that his spiritual doubts mean his faith is strong, and that he is “ready” to make a special contribution to his religion.

The next time we see Wasim, he is crouched upon the prow of a wooden boat to which a motor has been affixed, a missile poised before him like a harpoon. His face is set, determined; he could be Palinurus, or a young whaler aboard the Pequod. The image is strangely alluring: the sea and the brightly-colored boat evoke epic poetry, and Wasim himself is handsome, with coffee-colored skin and searching eyes. When the missile strikes the hull of the oil tanker, we don’t see or hear the explosion. The screen merely fades to white, allowing us to imagine heaven, or the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to which Wasim’s father had often alluded.

When I first watched this scene, I was dismayed by how aesthetically pleasing it was. Why weren’t we shown the fireball, the victims, the twisted metal, the thousands of gallons of spilled oil contaminating the Gulf? After all, the film hadn’t shied away from showing us the deaths of the emir’s son and his family at the hands of the Americans. It seemed, at the very least, partisan to show the United States as responsible for the deaths of a young family while only suggesting that an Islamic militant destroyed what was in effect a symbol—a bloated, ugly ship standing in for capitalism.

The more I thought about the way Wasim’s mission was portrayed, however, the more sense it made. I expected to see the gruesome aftermath of the attack because I had already seen it so many times on the news. But rather than replicate images of what by now has become, sadly, routine violence, director Stephen Gaghan makes the daring choice to show us the mission as Wasim must have seen it—as something beautiful. He forces us to see suicide missions from the point of view of the perpetrators, those who must often believe that they are in the right. For me, at least, this was an uncomfortable position to be in. It made it difficult for me to see suicide bombers as unquestionably evil. While their acts are indisputably evil, it appeared their motivation might not be. Some might well be misguided individuals who commit grave sins in the name of a higher good.

In this way, the film invites us to compare Wasim with its other idealists, most notably Nasir Al-Subaai an emir’s son who wants to bring his people greater rights and free elections, and the American Bryan Woodman, who leaves behind his grieving family and puts his life at risk in the hopes of helping Nasir come to power. Like Wasim, these characters believe they’re in the right, and are willing to put their lives on the line for their beliefs. Their motives, however, are mixed: the emir’s son is as interested in maintaining his family’s wealth as he is in working for the rights of his people, and Woodman too is swayed by the thought of riches. In this way, Syriana offers us no heroes, no easy answers. Even the anonymous American who bombs the emir’s SUV may be convinced that he too is in the right, working for the higher good of his country’s defense.

This, I think, is Syriana’s most important message: that issues like the ones surrounding oil and terrorism are extraordinary complex, and that they can’t be reduced to black-and-white, whether we want to paint the terrorists, the oil barons, or the corrupt politicians as the villains. It’s not a Bush-bashing film, though it does critique his policies at times (such as with the hypocritically-named Committee for the Liberation of Iran); nor is it a relativistic one. Syriana doesn’t suggest that all moral codes are equivalent so much as it invites us to take a good hard look at those codes, and to acknowledge that our motivations can be murkier, our wellsprings of action more intricate, than we would like to assume.