No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. There are, indeed, scenes of men staring at goats in The Men Who Stare at Goats. However, fans of goats -- and of men who stare at them -- may be disappointed to learn that this is but a small part of the overall story. Based on Jon Ronson's non-fiction book about real-life, super-secret military experiments into paranormal research, the fictionalized movie is a funny, scattershot, sometimes feather-light attempt to make a linear story out of a genuinely fascinating topic. It helps that the film has a marvelous cast, and a script that does a decent job of mining the loopier details out of Ronson's research.
And now that you're interested, let's go to another flashback! There's a lot of voiceover in The Men Who Stare at Goats, provided by Ewan McGregor's journalist character. If this seems naggingly familiar, it's because McGregor provided a similar narration in Tim Burton's Big Fish with the same soft Southern accent and sing-song, storyteller inflection. The voiceovers are provided to tie together the jumps back and forth in time, as McGregor tells us about his trip to Iraq in an attempt to prove his worth as a reporter after his marriage falls apart, and the stories shared with him by a military operative (George Clooney) about the Army's branch that trained psychically gifted super-soldiers in the 1980s with the goal of creating "Jedi warriors" who could fight wars via peaceful means. Director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan handle the swaps between time frames as deftly as possible, but it's still an awkward way to tell the tale, and it creates some frustration as the narrative is repeatedly interrupted to return to the other storyline.
Clooney and Bridges and Spacey, oh my. Heslov and Straughan strive for deadpan, Coen Brothers-like whimsy, and if they don't succeed entirely they certainly did a fine job of choosing actors -- in addition to Clooney and McGregor, they've cast Jeff Bridges as the doped-up, long-haired, New Age-y leader of the psi-ops unit, and Kevin Spacey as a late recruit whose ego and ambition bring a dark cloud to the mission. The strength of the cast and the premise, which satirizes/illuminates the often ridiculous programs on which the U.S. military squanders our tax dollars, go a long way to making The Men Who Stare at Goats an entertaining ride. It's silly, and quirky, and lightweight, and while it would have been nice if Heslov had presented the material in a meatier fashion, it's still quite fun.