Drivel

Rating: 1/10 (2 August 2010)

There is a non-fiction book entitled "The men who stare at goats" by the journalist Jon Ronson. Ronson has an autobiographical style, meaning he appears as a character in his own books as the interviewer, and he describes here his attempts to track down the retired members of a former experimental army team of psychic warriors. It's well worth a read, though I understand that some people can find Ronson's sometimes faux naif style a bit grating.
This is not a film of that book, and the central journalist character is not a portrayal of Ronson. Apart from the title, it borrows a few ideas from the book, and just makes the rest up. The book's upstairs, but I can't be bothered to go up and check every episode. To give an indication, though, everything that takes place in the Middle East (i.e. the core plot of the film) is made up. There is some discussion of Al-Qaeda and Iraq, but the context for that is Abu Ghraib and the humiliation and torture of civilians, a different (and nastier) world altogether to the depoliticised and decontextualised sub-MASH larks of Kevin Spacey's desert base.
I was going to make this review an impassioned defence of Ronson's integrity, and sympathise with him for the mutilation of his book. But then I found an interview in which he seems perfectly happy with the film, proud even. Who am I therefore to complain that they've catastrophically misunderstood the point of the book? But I still say it's drivel.
While I'd have been happy to sit through a straight documentary, with archive footage and filmed interviews and talking heads, I don't really object to the film-makers' loss of nerve and decision to liven the story up with some fiction. It's just that if that's what you're going to do, it ought to be a lot better than this aimless, characterless, virtually plot less mess. If you're going to make it up, you ought at least to make up something interesting and worthwhile.
Because here's the terrible truth. There's no such thing as psychic powers. No really; they don't exist. If they did, we'd know, and there wouldn't be any argument. People can't walk through walls. People can't kill animals by the power of thought. People can't "remote view" and find things hundreds of miles away just by thinking about them. Had any of these things worked, the army would still be working on them.
The real story here was a desperately sad one about the dimensions of human folly and yearning, and also a story about frustrated and distorted idealism, because the bizarre attempt to develop a kinder and more sensitive (!) form of imperialist warfare was founded in the genuine disquiet and disgust borne from the Vietnam experience.
But this is not the film of that story.