Good but overly silly

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2009)

This is the fictionalized story of a reporter who got on the trail of America's Psi warriors. These were, and are, a group of men trying to find ways of waging war via decidedly unconventional means such as psychic mind control and remote viewing. The film follows Ewan McGregor, as a reporter, who decides to go to Kuwait during the Gulf War and then on into Iraq , only to find he can't find away to go to where the action is. Instead he meets George Clooney and ends up on a wild ride into Iraq and into the world of the psychic soldiers.
The film takes a straight forward book and pumps up the humor factor for its own purposes. The result is that much of material comes off as a decidedly silly send up of government running amok in the wrong direction. I'm not sure that the material really needed the puffing since what actually happened in some cases was actually funny enough on its own terms. The titled event, the story of a man staring at a goat in an effort to kill it with his mind, resulted in the man staring at the animal for something like 36 hours until it keeled over. I heard the book's author Jon Ronson on the radio and he is pretty sure that the goat just fell over from exhaustion rather than anything that was done to it by the person staring at it. The film turns it into something else entirely. What the soldiers go through is every "new age" joke, when apparently the real soldiers played it much more seriously. As someone who's read about the military's attempts at using these unconventional means I was kind of disappointed that they played it so silly. Did all of these guys really need to be so crazy? I enjoyed it but at the same time I didn't love it like I thought I should have, I some how felt that it was too condescending. Very well acted its clear that everyone making the film was having a good time and that the film was a labor of love. The fact that everyone in the cast was really having a good time helps to sell the material more than it deserves.
Ultimately it's a good but not great film and worth a look.