I saw this movie last night, and also met the Director/Writer/Interviewer Rachel Boynton after the movie. It was very good, balanced, and complex. There's a potentially Georgist angle, never explored, regarding the resource curse, but it's more complicated than that, involving culture, poverty - both before and after the oil is drilled - and aspirations of both oil men and of third world countries like Ghana and Nigeria. The Director said afterwards that she does not see the world in terms of villains and heroes, and the film reflects that lack of judgmentalism. One is left wondering how so many things could go wrong with so many people who felt they were trying to do right, but that is due to the underlying economic corruption of the oil resource business, which the film does not seriously challenge, but merely documents. The clear underdogs are the people of Ghana and Nigeria, who have few opportunities outside the oil industry.
The film ends before it's clear whether the people of Ghana will ultimately see the profits from the oil in their land. In contrast to the Norwegian model, most African nations suffer from the oil curse, where the wealth is not redistributed to the People. A compromise was reached with the impoverished militants to basically pay them off not to destroy oil equipment in Nigeria, but during Q&A, Boynton said the job-training part of the deal was "a joke."
Highly recommended.
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How big oil destroys the world: A real-life saga of greed
Indeed, Boynton always seeks to return the story to a human scale, even when it’s a story of skulduggery, corruption and international finance (three interchangeable terms, one might say), a story that leaps around, soap-opera style, from New York to Dallas to the Niger Delta to the Ghanaian capital, Accra. For instance, it would have been easy for a certain kind of left-wing muckraker to render Jim Musselman, the CEO of a small oil company called Kosmos Energy (does that sound like a CIA front group or what?), as an inherently bad person: He’s a bald, rich, white guy from Texas who stands to become a whole lot richer after Kosmos’ gamble on Ghanaian oil turns into a winning lottery ticket. When he shows up to greet a Ghanaian tribal chief bearing bottles of Scotch and Hennessey and a $10,000 donation for an educational charity (whether or not this is a bribe remains unclear), it’s pretty easy for the viewer to start edging toward contempt.