The Men Who Stare at Goats

Plot: After being dumped by his wife for another man, a reporter named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) tries to lose himself in writing about the war in Iraq. In Baghdad, he meets a “psychic soldier” named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who tells him about a US government’s project that aims to use psychokinesis and parapsychology to defeat the enemy. On the list of powers of a psychic soldier is making himself invisible, seeing things at other locations, cloud bursting and walking through walls. Cassady tells him the soldiers in the programme were also call Jedi Warriors and that his rival in the scheme has gone over to the Dark Side and must be stopped.

Review: The funniest thing about this movie is that the US government actually had such a programme, a fact uncovered in part one of Jon Ronson’s 2004 three-part documentary TV series “Crazy Rulers of the World”. The First Earth Battalion, founded in 1979, practised mind reading, out-of-body travel, and the ability to “think” beings to death.

Somehow the idea of death-thought, etc. is both fascinating and horrifying when you imagine a supposedly civilised army spending their time and the taxpayer’s money trying to develop such skills, but as fodder for a movie plot, it’s just silly and – amazingly – sometimes a bit boring. Wilton and Clooney’s odyssey through the desert of Iraq in a gleaming rental car feels more like a B-level American road movie – and a look at the movie’s details on imdb.com shows it was in fact filmed in New Mexico.

While “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is amusing, with McGregor and Clooney doing a nice job of it, I recommend you google “Crazy Rulers of the World” instead.
(Katrin Gygax)