Movie Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Wednesday, November 18

A slack night, dire need for some brain candy, an all-star ensemble cast, and a cool premise, and the ingredients are in place: I'm headed for the multiplex to see this latest George Clooney (executive producer) offering.

The actors are fun to watch--Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. They are relaxed and having fun in this film, Clooney's charisma pulling the deal together: "Hey guys, let's hang together and chill on location--it'll be a gas--the bars here in Morocco are AMAZING!

Clooney is in his usual grizzled, damaged goods mode, crazy, but flashing moments of brilliance, casual, improvisational, laid-back, unshaven, boozy. It's a pose he's got down to perfection. On second thought, it's not a pose.

Then there's Jeff Bridges, playing an aging pony-tailed hippie--oh, wait a minute, he didn't even have to get into character. Top it off with Kevin Spacey, who is sinister, evil incarnate. He's gone a little to seed, and villain roles seem to come naturally now.

Add Ewan McGregor, who offers a perfect comic foil for the veteran thespians.

So far so good.

Then the premise: The US Army, desperate to keep up with the Soviets, embarked on a top-secret program to harness paranormal phenomena for military purposes. PERFECT!

In fact, like all good fantasies, this story has a basis in fact. The CIA acknowledged in 1995 the existence of secret operations involving the use of specially trained people to psychically spy on distant targets.

W. Adam Mandelbaum is author of the book Psychic Battlefield (published by St. Martins Press). He is a former intelligence professional, who served with the United States National Security Agency. He details the history of paranormal research in military application, calling it the "Military-Occult Complex".

For example, British intelligence used a supposed remote viewer in WWII named "Ann" who allegedly could psychically spy on high level military meetings in Berlin. Subsequently, the CIA sponsored remote viewing research which was said to yield valuable espionage information. Talented subjects were trained to locate hostages and track down enemy weapons systems, with mixed results.

All this is detailed in the movie, to amusing effect. It's one of those unknowable realms that's just goofy and plausible enough to have garnered taxpayer dollars for secret military purposes.

But, inexplicably, the movie veers toward audience political indoctrination when the plot takes us to the Iraq War, where sinister forces (Spacey) have commandeered the psychic program to inflict torture on Iraqi prisoners.

Heavy handed cliches of the Hollywood Left then intrude: The Americans are shown as bumbling, shoot-em-up private security firm goons, their bullets maiming bewildered Iraqi civilians; the Army tortures "innocent" Iraqis with diabolical Psy-Op techniques, Abu Ghraib-style; George Bush swaggers on TV in his now-infamous "mission-accomplished" moment.

The solution: Unaccountably, Jeff Bridges arrives just in time to put LSD into the breakfasts of bivouacked army soldiers in the desert where the Psy-Op unit is doing its evil work. Implausibly, all is peace and love as the soldiers drop their weapons in a combat zone and groove to their hallucinations.

Unfortunately, I can't think of anything more likely to induce a "bad trip" than secretly drugging soldiers on alert in enemy territory with hallucinogenic drugs. But, since the mentality of the writer-producers is rooted firmly in the '60s, it's all good vibes as Clooney, Bridges, and McEwan gleefully liberate the Iraqi detainees, as well as a herd of goats, into the desert (Just watch the trailers if you want to know how the goats fit in).

As the credits rolled, I got a queasy feeling thinking about those just-sprung orange jump-suited Al Qaeda suspects receding into the sand dunes. Will they perhaps next be headed for New York City? Hope our military protectors won't just be chillin' on acid and positive psychic energy when they arrive.