Jedi Warriors

Rating: 7/10 (29 November 2009)

"The Men Who Stare At Goats" opens with a sentence on the screen, "More of this is true than you would believe", and indeed that seems likely, depending on who you are. It's a glib introduction, but it also has an extra element of self-conscious awareness. The story is so inherently weird and subjective that believing it completely would be somewhat foolish. A movie about this particular series of events couldn't possibly be 100% accurate, and "The Men Who Stare At Goats" is not a film that is overly concerned with trying to portray historical facts. The opening sentence is a warning for the audience, that things like this can't be perfectly explained.
Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton, a reporter at a small newspaper in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He finds himself recently cast aside by his wife and in need of distraction, if not complete rebirth. He finds the first, and possibly the second, rather accidentally, in Kuwait City in the form of Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former Special Ops military man. Bob had recently written a newspaper story about Gus Lacey (Stephen Root), a man who claimed to have psychic powers of his own, as well as knowledge of the US Army's involvement with psychic research and the possible military applications of such capabilities. From that story, Bob recognizes Lyn Cassady's name as someone who was also involved in the program that Lacey described to Bob. Wilton attaches himself to Cassady at this point, and Cassady leads Wilton down the rabbit hole, through the Iraqi desert, and into a crazy world of Military Intelligence, the classic oxymoron.
Cassady explains himself as having been the most successful psychic soldier, a "Jedi Warrior", in fact, of a program in the US Army called the New Earth Army. The NEA was the brainchild and proposition to the Army of Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, perfectly cast), a Vietnam veteran and new age hippie. Django is the most unlikely of soldiers, and he guides his troop of men through various exercises to attempt to create a peaceful army for the new millennium, using the power of positive energy, psychic strength, and dancing. Yes, dancing. If the history of this bizarre story is to believed, a group of Army soldiers danced together regularly, in uniform, on a military base, in a free-form style, to rid themselves of inhibition in order to become more powerful soldiers of love and good mojo.
This was back in the 1980's, the Reagan era, and President Reagan himself was said to be a supporter of this kind of research. It seems the Soviets were themselves attempting to employ psychic powers to gain an advantage in the cold war or perhaps to end it, one would assume and our side didn't want to fall behind on a potentially ground-breaking front.
Clooney plays Lyn Cassady sympathetically, as a man convinced of his own supernatural ability and driven by a desire to do good and perhaps help reform the Army, if not the human race, through the techniques and belief system he has committed his existence to. Cassady is not a young idealist any more, as the bulk of the movie takes place in the early part of this decade, years after the New Earth Army has dissolved and given way to the Bush era. The current administration is attempting to use some of the techniques and findings of Django and Cassady for torture and other nefarious practices. You may have heard of the Army using the music of the big purple dinosaur Barney as a torture device against captives in Iraq. That's one of the things that Cassady refers to as part of "the dark side". Cassady is an aging idealist, and he sees Bob Wilton as a tool for redemption a man who can tell Cassady's story to the world. Cassady is, in the frame-work of the film, a mystifying figure; insane or brilliant, pathetic or heroic. Clooney deadpans the part as he must, since any over-playing of Cassady's cards would almost certainly betray the man as a buffoon and a liar. And anyway, George Clooney doesn't know any better than you or I do, even after seeing the movie, what is real and what is not.
But that's beside the point, or perhaps it is the point. As Clooney and McGregor (our former Obi-Wan is hilariously confused about the way of the Jedi) tumble through this movie, almost nothing factual becomes clear. We see some desperate men in the process of trying to do some good running up against the standard problems that confront such people the will of those in power who do not concern themselves with morals, but rather attempt to "succeed" and "win" at any cost. There is a hilarious scene wherein two security companies full of soldiers-for-hire, all of US origin, accidentally find themselves in a firefight sparked by misunderstanding and machismo. It is classically FUBAR (a military term for screwed up), and as Clooney, McGregor and an Iraqi man they have recently befriended skip out of the skirmish ("my house is near here", says the Iraqi), the message is simple: Fear and aggression are powerful forces that can consume anyone, and good mojo and innocence are easy targets. Sometimes it's best just to get out of the way.
"The Men Who Stare At Goats" is a sad yet somehow triumphant tale of good persevering over evil, if only in the hearts and minds of a few fairly powerless humans. In our time, in this crazy, mixed-up, violent and fearful world, what else do we have, anyway? Love, dancing, and the movies