The Men Who Stare At Goats’ is proof that truth is stranger than fiction and another example that sanity and warfare do not go hand in hand.
The story is based on real life ‘psychic soldiers’ in the US military documented in the book by British journalist Jon Ronson. The screenwriter , Peter Straughan, has made a valiant attempt to make a linear narrative here but it still ends up disjointed and sprawling.
Nevertheless, it provides a perfect vehicle for Jeff Bridges and George Clooney and it is worth seeing for their performances alone.
Bridges plays Bill Django, a character based on Jim Channon who founded the First Earth Battalion Channon instructs aspirant super-soldiers in how to harness their psychic powers and introduced new age values for those “who dare to think the unthinkable”. He advocates “warrior monks” and “visionary scouts” in place of conventional soldiers. A tour of Channon’s website is quite an eye opener and leaves you wondering how he managed to persuade the hawks in the military that these tactics could succeed.
Clooney’s character is mainly based on Guy Savelli who believes it is possible to kill goats(and so also human beings) by staring at them and also that you could gain knowledge of enemies through the practice of ‘remote viewing’.
The U.S. Federal Government poured $20m dollars of research money into The Stargate Project to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena.To no-one’s great surprise no such evidence was found and the project ended in 1995.
