George Clooney loves political satire, and here we have yet another film of that ilk. The movie is less than two hours long, but it seems slower as there are stretches in the film that drag.  The cast on the other hand is not a drag– Clooney, Bridges, Spacey, and McGregor and all four men play their parts well. Clooney may well get an Oscar nomination for this role. The story is somewhat loosely based on real events, specifically in the 80s, where the Army at good ole Fort Bragg in my home state, decided to try and create psychic warriors, or as they are called in the movie Jedi warriors. You must remember how very popular the Lucas films were in that time period.   The basic premise is that soldiers could be trained to fight with their minds, perhaps with the aid of psycho-tropic drugs. If you can drop a goat at 20 paces just by concentrating your psychic energies on it and staring, then clearly, many things might be possible.

There are humorous moments in this film, and the sheer stupidity of some of the things attempted by the Army in the service of trying to get a military advantage over the Russians, or whoever, else may seem fantastic, until you sadly learn that some of it was true.  This does not inspire confidence in some of the brains behind the military machine during that period of time. There is of course a fine line between satire done with respect and ridicule, and sometimes one gets the feeling in this film that the line has been crossed. 

The story is told from the perspective of a reporter, played by McGregor  from Ann Arbor Michigan who eventually tells the story of the psychic warriors, only to be basically ignored.  This is equally disturbing. The reporter goes to Iraq only to run into one of the old psychic warriors who knew one of the men the reporter had interviewed in Ann Arbor who had been in the same unit.  Perhaps even more perturbing is the little that is revealed about the so-called independent contractors in Iraq supposedly serving our cause for profit (think Haliburton) while vying with one another for turf.

This movie will not likely be nominated for best picture of the year, quite rightly, and it earns its R rating for language and a hot tub scene. Its most funny moments are basically viewable in the trailers, so you need not go if your main purpose in going is to have a laugh. But if you are like the child who pulls up the front door mat because you like to see the creepy little disturbing things crawling around outside your normal view, then this is a movie for you. Be prepared to laugh occasionally, and be disturbed more frequently when it dawns on you— some of this true, not merely modern polemics by an old school liberal like Kentucky’s own George Clooney.