The Men Who Stare At Goats

You wait for a film about the American involvement in Iraq to turn up and then… The Men Who Stare At Goats is based on journalist Jon Ronson’s investigation into how an American army unit of psychic spies (or "Jedi Warriors"), were trained to develop a range of parapsychological skills including invisibility, remote viewing, cloud bursting, walking through walls, and intuition. The title refers to the ability to kill a goat by staring at it, a successful event that led to the unit having bad karma. Given the setting of Iraq it was remarkable to me how light the film was it comes across like a screwball comedy in places. The unit used a number of psychological techniques when dealing with prisoners, some more legal than others; this was dealt with in a curiously brief manner at the end of the film. It begs the question did those wacky US Army soldiers torture Iraqis? What’s truly shocking though is the appearance of that purple skinned horror Barney the cloying dinosaur, you have been warned. January 2010