The Men Who Stare at Goats
Written by Peter Straughan, based on the book of the same name by Jon Ronson
Directed by Grant Heslov
Starring: Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey
Warning: this review does contain some spoilers. There are surprises and twists in the movie, and if you’d rather not know them going on, bookmark this page, and then read it after you see the film.
I went into this movie expecting a military comedy, perhaps a mockery of psi phenomena. But as I sat there, watching the story of a small-town reporter trying to enhance his career and standing by grabbing hold of the only tenuous story going his way, I became enthralled.
The movie is kind of disjointed, as reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) tells us a story in the present (approximately 2003), and through Lyn Cassady’s (George Clooney) unending series of flashbacks to the early 1980s and the 1990s, and through Cassady’s recitations of Bill Django’s (Jeff Bridges) memories of the Vietnam War and the late 1970s. In fact, so disjointed, that I’ll ignore that feature of the film.
We start with Brigadier General Dean Hopgood (Stephen Lang) sitting in his office, staring at the wall. And after apparently having made a decision, Hopgood gets up—still staring at the wall—says he’s going into the next office, and runs headlong at the wall. Bam, ouch! He hits the wall and falls down.
Prior to Hopgood’s unsuccessful attempt at phasing through the wall, Bill Django was a line officer in Vietnam. In the course of getting wounded, Django made an important discovery about the psychology of new soldiers, and then managed to convince his superiors to let him pursue his new theory: the theory that people don’t want to kill, and that the best way to run the Army would be as non-violent group designed to prevent conflict. After seven years of experiencing all sorts of alternative cultures (mostly the hippy movement), Django returned to the Army and set up his own unit, the New Earth Army, where he would train his men to unleash the powers of the mind, making them psychic soldiers, warrior monks, or Jedi Warriors.
One of the most talented of his cadre was Lyn Cassady, who was most talented at remote viewing, but had other skills as well. Cassady and the rest of the Jedi Warriors were able to find kidnap victims, lost items, and more. They all embraced the new culture, exemplified by the freedom of the dance (this is one of the least “Army” Army units ever—Django, for one, keeps his long ponytail and scruffy beard).
But one day, Major Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) shows up as the newest recruit for the New Earth Army. Unlike all the other true believers in the unit, Hooper is a realist. He’s not in it to make the world a better place, but to actually do the things they may or may not be doing. He wants to make a buck at it.
Through Hooper’s machinations, Django loses command of the unit. And then we get the title scene, as Hooper is forced to prove the utility of the unit he is now commanding. To that end, Cassady is forced to, well, stare at a goat, trying to stop its heart. Cassady stares, the goat chews its cud. Cassday strains, the goat continues on placidly. Hooper starts sweating. Cassady strains even more… and the goat falls over, dead.
The present tense story follows Wilton, the reporter, as he sits in Kuwait, waiting to be allowed to cross into Iraq, to find a story, to prove to his cheating wife that he is a valuable reporter, not just a patsy at a small town newspaper. Sitting in the bar, he meets Cassady, recognizes him from the description of a local crackpot he’d interviewed years before, and manages to glom on long enough for Cassday to recognize Wilton’s doodling as a sign that they should be together. So they cross the border on Cassady’s “secret mission”. Unfortunately, Cassady isn’t 100% positive what the mission is (it came to him in a vision). But they adventure around, Cassady teaches Wilton the ways of the Force… er, the New Earth Army, and they have run-ins with the regular military and contractor companies enough to make a mockery of most US efforts in Iraq earlier this decade.
Then, just as all seems to be at an end, they stumble across a small base in the middle of nowhere, and discover contractor Bill Django, now working for Larry Hooper’s PSICorp (but in this case, the “psi” is psychological warfare, not psychic). Well, mostly. Django is burnt out, but not completely. He manages to reconnect with Cassady, recognize Wilton as their new recruit, and recommit to his old ideals. Then Django and Cassady fly off into the sunset, never to be seen again, leaving Wilton behind to tell their story.
Through most of the film, the actors play it straight: their characters truly believe everything they’re doing, all the psychic phenomena, and so forth. But we, the viewer, have only their word for it that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Much of the audience found it uproariously funny, but in retrospect, any slightly experienced sf audience would recognize many of the old psi tropes, and not laugh nearly as loudly as those who didn’t recognize their foundations. Be that as it may, when I wasn’t laughing along with the rest of the audience, I was worried the film was going to turn out like Eddie Murphy’s Imagine That (see this review), where all the supposed fantasy world, which gave him real, useful answers, had absolutely no reality. Fortunately, these filmmakers are better at it: late in the film, they give us a very large hint that some of this weird stuff may actually have been real. And for that, I thank them. They had the commitment to their story to do it properly.
I was also thrilled with a minor meta-story piece of the film. Throughout their buddy-road-movie exploits, Cassady (Clooney) is forever teaching Wilton (McGregor) what the Jedi Warriors did, and how they did it. Lyn Cassady is no Qui-Gon Jinn, but damn!
The Men Who Stare at Goats is not being pitched as a fantasy film. The producers don’t even hint that there might be anything science fictional in the film. They use the science fictional terminology winkingly, as a broad joke to the broad audience. But this film is quite emphatically speculative fiction. I loved it.