The gentleman’s gentleman Who Stare At Goats is about warrior - monks with psychic great power , who call themselves Jedis over and over again . But the motion-picture show ’s complex body part also echoes the original Star Wars trilogy , and it ’s full of fun Lucas riffs . Spoilers below …
In Men Who Stare At Goats , Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton a reporter who ’s trying to escape from his irksome life , so when he gets wind of a secret military program from the 1980s to make “ Jedi ” soldier , he follows the story . At first , you suppose that he ’s just a very off - beat embedded diarist , following the semi - retired Jedi Lyn Cassady ( George Clooney ) around , but it becomes open that Wilton is getting more out of this than just a account : He ’s becoming Cassady ’s Padawan and learning to become a Jedi himself .
McGregor , of course , run Obi - Wan Kenobi in the three Star Wars prequels , and the film winks at this fact a few times , when Clooney says McGregor know nothing about being a Jedi . But actually , in many ways , this is the Star Wars movie I care McGregor had starred in before — it ’s about learning the ways of the Jedi , and take care the contradiction inherent in the phrase “ warrior - monk . ”
In caprine animal , which is found very slackly on the actual - life floor of the New Earth Army , we discover that the U.S. Army develop a secret program , following the mortification of Vietnam , to fight a new mode . And this knotty develop psychic powers , but also letting in some of the counterculture ’s feeling of anarchy and playfulness . drug , long hair and crazy paintings . alas , one of the leading Jedi in this organization was on the Q.T. aligned with the Dark Side ( this is in reality explictly say at least once ) and he corrupts the system , stain the other leading Jedis and turning one of them into his henchman of evil . So in the end , McGregor is the film ’s Luke Skywalker , learning the Jedi legacy and at long last helping to restore the light side .
Along the way , Clooney does n’t just teach McGregor how to erupt cloud with his mind : he gives McGregor a grounding in the spiritual discipline behind the Jedi direction , with a mixture of battiness and sageness that ’s really kind of inebriate .
All of this is played with clapper pretty hard in cheek , but at the same time , it ’s made pretty explicit . And the movie is as charming as McGregor , Bridges and Clooney can make it . bridge , particularly , brightens up the screenland every clock time he turns up as Bill Django , the founder of the Jedi organisation .
There ’s a parable , here , of the way of life in which America itself has turn by from chance to become more peace - loving , more creative , and less exploitative of our natural resources and of each other . And the bankruptcy of the “ Jedi ” programme to meld the hipster “ peace and love ” ethos with the war machine ’s bombination - swing culture does n’t just expose the fact that you ca n’t be a soldier and a monk ( in our military , anyway . ) The culture clash also train to say something about America , and the way in which we ’ve betrayed the hope of the 1970s peace movement .
Here ’s a personal parcel : I have an alarmingly low tolerance for Baby Boomer nostalgia and , after several years in the Haight Ashbury , my hippie kitsch allergy is at a lasting layer of anaphylactic shock . And yet , there is something beautiful and hilarious about the scene where Bridges transmute his US Army whole into a chemical group of shaggy - haired , dancing oddballs . And something heartbreaking about seeing the Dark Side destroying the Jedis . Mostly , this is because Jeff Bridges and George Clooney are so much fun to watch , you do n’t care .
And like I said , Star Wars sit at the kernel of the movie ’s themes . At one point , Clooney state that the Jedi program flourished in the eighties because Ronald Reagan was such a large Star Wars devotee . Reagan ’s Star Wars , of course , was a missile defense program that many scientists claimed was windy , but Reagan never get go of the estimation . Star Wars is so many dissimilar things to unlike people : a brilliant war story , a windowpane into one man ’s personal increment , a parable of controlling your hate and choosing repose … part of why the original trilogy was so muscular was that it spoke to so many citizenry in so many different ways .
And in a way , world Who Stare At Goats is as much about the legacy of Star Wars as is it as about the legacy of woo - woo New Age hippie culture . Our culture was so heavily shape by Star Wars , it open up different ways of thinking about the style of the warrior , as well as extend some of the most exciting battle scenes ever committed to film . How you view Star Wars says a lot about your outlook on the universe in general .
Capricorn the Goat is often hilarious and sometimes chilling , but it ’s not a double-dyed movie . In particular , the pacing is a mo lead - footed at times , and the story loses some of its wallop as a result . The movie ’s mix of fatuousness and scary war vista unquestionably wo n’t work for everybody — I liked this film quite a bit , but Entertainment Weekly gave it an F. But all in all , I found it an entertaining , idea - chivvy ride — of all the oddball films that have come out of late ( include The Box and Fourth Kind ) I ’d say caprine animal is the most playfulness , and the most entertaining . Mostly , it ’s Jeff Bridges and George Clooney plainly have a blast playing another pair of larger - than - living characters , and that ’s a stooge ride I ’m always uncoerced to take .
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