After seeing this movie, I could only surmise that it's some kind of disinformation film to make jokes out of what is commonly known as remote viewing. The movie portrays remote viewers as army's attempt to train soldiers to be new age hippies (seriously). From what I've read the real remote viewers were deadly effective (otherwise the government wouldn't have funded them for 23 years). But if the effectiveness of remote viewing was really conveyed, it would be disclosing one of the closely guarded secrets of US military operations. So my take after seeing the movie is that it was created to be a disinformation campaign to make the world believe that this is what remote viewing is about. None of the characters in the movie could do remote viewing. As if it didn't exist. And maybe that's the real message this movie wanted to convey.

Its not new in Hollywood to present bland silliness and satire packaged with utmost seriousness, 'The Men Who Stare at Goats' comes off initially as a potential winner from this genre. While it had the necessary humor and a stellar star-cast capable of enacting that, the script neither reaches the edginess it should have nor pushes the boundary to make this movie memorable.Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) is a journalist by profession and going through a professional and personal crisis that he is so desperate to get out of. When he meets Gus Lacey (Stephen Root) and hears about the US Army's 'New Earth Army' that deals with parapsychology and psychic capabilities trained by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), he knows that he encountered the story he has been waiting for that could get him out of his crisis. He meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) by chance in Iraq and tags along with him into wilderness to cover a 'mission' in action.George Clooney and Jeff Bridges have played goofy characters in the past - 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and 'The Big Lebowski' respectively, a little disappointed that they don't share enough screen space. However it was more than compensated with some crackling chemistry and impeccable comic timing between McGregor and Clooney. While the writers, director and editors succeed in setting up an interesting plot taking cues from disjointed real events, the audience would be stuck in a never ending wait for the stakes to go up. Kevin Spacey does a character he has done a thousand times over and seems to have sleepwalked it. The production values are excellent all thanks to the big cast it boasts of, though the quality of humor is great, the jokes are a little too few and far to get wholesome entertainment. Though the director Grant Heslov is not new to Hollywood, it is still his debut of directing a major Hollywood feature and does a decent job.Watch it for the satire, crackling chemistry and comic timing between Clooney and McGregor. Feels like a meal that finished with just the appetizers.

The story is really a very different kind of high imagination. Imagination is the heart of story telling. Mostly in movies it is seen in movies of Animation and Fictional genre. But this is movie does not belong to both of those categories. A journalist with the bored life and a disinterested wife decides to take some thing adventurous in his life and attempts entering Iraq. In the course he meets couple of people who worked for Black Ops in the past and claim to have psychic powers upon which they were trained upon. He meets Clooney in the attempt to go to Iraq and then he explains the whole thing that happened previously to him when he was in the New Earth Army which was responsible for the psychic power development in soldiers. And when it was used to kill a goat, Lyn (Clooney) believes their is curse laid on them. He wanted to expose all the things that happened to the world and thinks the journalist would do the job for him. He takes him to place where the psychic power research was still being done and headed in the wrong way in Iraq. He shows him that and frees all the animals and soldiers who were imprisoned there, and leaves. Definitely the performances of George Clooney,Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey is outstanding, and the most appealing part of the movie to me was "Most of this is true than you would believe".

A really great cast stars in "The Men Who Stare at Goats," a 2009 film directed by Grant Heslov. George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey -- an exceptional group, with a screenplay by Peter Straughan.An unlucky in love, depressed reporter (Ewan McGregor) goes to join the war in Iraq and meets a special forces agent, Lyn Cassady (Clooney). Cassady tells him a wild story about a psychic division of the military that is trained to do remote viewing and whose mission is to end the violence of war.This is a great premise for a film, but it isn't done particularly well. There seems to have been no decision as to whether it was a comedy or drama. With a focus either way, the elements could have been mixed well, because there are some hilarious moments as well as some very dramatic moments. The problem is, you don't know how to react, so the experience is discomfiting.I don't like animal abuse shown or talked about, even though the peace and love character played by Jeff Bridges as well as Lyn don't like that aspect of their work. I realize there was no real abuse, but what was talked about was pretty gross.The performances are very good, with Clooney saying the most outrageous things with complete commitment and intensity, Bridges doing a character similar to what he played in Big Lebowski, McGregor dazed and confused, and Spacey as an ambitious guy who hopes to use the group toward his own ends. But they're all better than this material.Could have been much better and much stronger.