Maxims and madmen

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2013)

Directed by Grant Heslov, and based on a Jon Ronson book by the same name, "The Men Who Stare At Goats" stars Ewan McGregor as a journalist who travels to Kuwait and then Iraq during the 2003 Iraq War.
"Goats" is typically read as either a comedy or a piece of investigative journalism. What it also is, though, is a very calculated political statement. It's plot is essentially this: after the Vietnam War, a series of US soldiers lose faith in the United States and begin to see it as a violent, callous nation. They thus promptly become hippies, pacifists and New Age activists. Banding together, they then form the First Earth Battalion, a military unit which fights with "love" and for "peace". The Batalion's attempts to undermine the US military-industrial-complex from within, however, fail completely; the military co-opts and perverts everything with its own overarching ethos.
Significantly, the Battalion's soldiers, who are a team of bizarre psychic warriors, are named after the Jedi knights from George Lucas' "Star Wars". Like that franchise's heroes (one of which Ewan McGergor also played), they then find themselves having to make an ethical choice; choose between their "dark" and "light" sides. The film then ends with various Jedi feeling guilty for "killing goats", "animals" which Ronson turns into a symbol for any and all civilians and soldiers killed and tortured by the US war machine. The Jedi thus choose to "set the goats" free, a moral act which goes punished.
"The Men Who Stare At Goats" stars Jeff Bridges as Bill Django, a character lovingly modelled on Bridges' now-iconic Jeffrey Lebowski. The film's soundtrack ("I See You", "More Than a Feeling", "I had a Dream", "Wishing and Hoping") encapsulates a very 1960s desire for social change, a yearning which the film's climax both satiates and is sceptical of. Some have found Heslov's characters too cartoonish (the film purports to be based on a true story), but his hippies are merely the logical flip side to a military-industrial-complex that is over-funded, wholly absurd and spiritually vacuous. "Goats" was Heslov's feature length debut.
8/10 – Worth one viewing.