The Men Who Stare at Goats, dir. Grant Heslov (2009)

The opening credits of The Men Who Stare at Goats roll beside footage of the War in Iraq set to an infectious pop song. The film never really gets beyond this sequence, which encapsulates the film perfectly: what seems sketched out to be political content—pixilated war footage, pop music—comes out as stifled, unfunny, and vacuous.  It becomes apparent that the film is attempting to pull the wool over our eyes. But to what?

The film belongs to a particular subgenre of paranoid fiction in which war—often World War II or, most commonly, the Cold War—has been realized as a space of innovation, and America’s wartime inventions have somehow become outdated. It’s a setup featured in everything from Gravity’s Rainbow to Lost. The best of these narratives (like the aforementioned two) are brilliant in their confused and hectic proportions. The Men Who Stare at Goats, on the other hand, is a simplistic tale of “good” soldiers and “bad” soldiers that collapses under the weight of its untenable ideological revisionism.

The film begins as Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a journalist from Michigan, interviews a man who claims to be a super soldier trained by the military to use his mind as a weapon during the Cold War.  Soon after, Wilton’s girlfriend dumps him. Drunk, crying, and watching George W. Bush on television, Wilton sets out to do what men looking to prove themselves in these sorts of stories do: he goes to war.  He makes it into Iraq with Lyn Cassady (George Clooney).  Cassady, rumored to be the most powerful of the super soldiers, spills the beans on the Army’s former First Earth Battalion, which was formed after Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) traveled across America smoking pot and having sex and decided to bring all his transcendent experiences into the military. Cassady goes on to relay the story of how the First Earth Batallion was overthrown from within by Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who tattled on Django’s eccentric practices and restored order to the enterprise that formerly consisted of heavy drug use, excessive facial hair, and rock ‘n’ roll music. Eventually, the Battalion was simply disbanded.

Ideologically, this is very important. The film—perhaps unwittingly—forms a “good guy” battalion within the U.S. Army. This fantastical dichotomy–that America once had an army that tended towards peace and love and mind control–this is what the film is really interested in.  Skirting the issue of war altogether, director Grant Heslov prefers to have Iraq become a set piece where terrorists, criminals, and private security forces are simply villains to be evaded, as in a video game. Ignoring the complexities of war allows the film to devolve into a black and white tale of the “good” army (represented by Cassady) versus the “bad” army (represented by Hooper).

The film’s climax sounds like something imagined by Woodstock ’69 trippers: the liberation (through the use of hallucinogenic drugs) of the tortured prisoners of a military camp. Yet it comes out lame and heartless, more like Woodstock ’99. When The Men Who Stare at Goats attempts to present us with a “bad” version of the “good” First Earth Battalion, it just doesn’t ring true. There’s no wall separating America’s “good” military from their “bad” military, only a pervasive shade of gray-green. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a forgettable attempt to convince us otherwise.