The Jedi Who Stare at Goats
Category: General
Tags: The Men Who Stare at Goats, Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Shadowcat
Ewan McGregor never considered the possibility of being typecast as a Jedi after playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the newest Star Wars films. It's a pretty limited role, confined to geek culture in an extremely specific universe not easily replicated. So when he picked up the script for The Men Who Stare at Goats, the last thing he expected to find was the word "Jedi" on almost every page, many times in reference to a character he was supposed to play. A character named Bob.
Ah, Hollywood.
The casting director for The Men Who Stare at Goats should get a raise. Even without a stellar script of dry, quirky humor, the fact that Ewan McGregor, former Jedi extraordinare, could say to George Clooney, "You're a Jedi?" and have it fit seamlessly into the plot, is classic. And it happens at least 20 times. Classic x 20.
In and of itself, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a unique, clever story, made all the more intriguing by the opening text, "More of this is true than you would believe." And sadly, I can believe that the entire thing is true. A secret military task force assigned to hone their latent psychic abilities for tactical location and defense purposes, based on the drug-addled hype of the 60s youth liberation and Communist paranoia. Actually, that's kind of awesome. So really, I hope that the entire thing is true.
As a light-hearted film largely concerning United Sates military presence in Iraq, the movie handles itself extremely well. The timing of the military shooting is unfortunate. However, a naked military trainee tripping on LSD is a far cry from the actual events, and is crucial to the plot in a way that makes it at least not an unnecessary comparison. Ewan McGregor and George Clooney alone are enough to keep my attention for an entire 2 hours, but added Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges and they'd have to be trying to make this a bad movie for it not to be entertaining.
The Men Who Stare at Goats does a fine job of toeing the line between science fiction and reality, throughout the entire movie never really admitting if the psychic abilities of the Jedi army are real, or rather fittingly, if it's all in their heads.
That is, until the end.
Throughout the film, Bob, (Ewan McGregor), is apparently destined to have met Lyn (George Clooney) and is in fact a very powerful Jedi. Bob has trouble believing this, but his life is in ruins and as he spends more time with a very convincing Lyn, he begins to see the potential truth in psychic powers. Or at least LSD. In the end, Bob sits at his desk at a local newspaper office, a finished story about the victory of a local women's sports team on his computer, and staring at the wall. He stands up, says something clever about life in general, and runs right through the wall. As in, he phasewalks through it. Like Shadowcat. Right at the end of the movie, in the very last scene, the fragile symbiosis between reality and fantasy explodes like a shallowly-buried IED. It's a trifle disappointing--I enjoyed the ambiguity, and would have preferred it if the film stopped the moment just before he hit the wall, preserving the trend.
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