Got assigned a review and then the piece was spiked. Ah well, these things happen. Anyway, I’m not realistically going to sell this review anywhere, so, after the jump, a zombie 1200 words on TMWSAG. Just want to let you know in advance: anyone who’s planning on commenting, “I see why they spiked it” — hardy har har, fella, it’s old already. Neutralized!

It was at this point in Jon Ronson’s fantastical account of the First Earth Battalion that I vowed to quit my job and devote my life to re-reporting The Men Who Stare At Goats to determine what parts of it are true:

I was open-mouthed and slack-jawed. I watched as he lay on a bed of nails while a trainee broke a cinder block on his stomach with a sledgehammer, he put steel spokes through the skin of his neck and forearms and lifted buckets of sand, then removed them with no bleeding and very little physical evidence of trauma, he had a tug-of-war with a dozen men who could not budge him a single inch, he even hypnotized a couple people in attendance. Green Berets were tossed around like rag dolls. The pain he could inflict was surreal. He could hurt someone badly with a finger. Mike, you’re not forgotten. The knife you gave me lies next to my beret. You tempered my soul for life. God bless Mike Echanis!

That’s an encomium to Michael Echanis, an Army Special Forces master sergeant, mercenary legend and inspirational Jedi Warrior. Echanis was a man who, allegedly, taught his Jedi disciples at Ft. Bragg — they called themselves that — that they could become invisible if, for example, they tried to look like lengths of connecting pipe when passing between buildings. He told his young Jedi they could immobilize an opponent by laconically walking by him, fixing a gaze to sharpen his concentration, engaging him by speaking in a calm and even tone, and then administering a fatal stab to his neck. He was the one, deep in concentration in a room known as the Goat Lab at the North Carolina home of the Special Forces, who ice-grilled a goat so hard the poor bastard keeled over and breathed his last. He died before the age of 30 in the jungles of Nicaragua, fighting for the tyrant Anastasio Somoza.

And it was at that point in the story that I decided anyone who cared what was real and what was apocryphal and what was invented in The Men Who Stare At Goats was hopelessly, tragically literal. This is a batshit story that demands to be judged by its essential quality of batshitness. For those interested in a dissection of what the film contains and what the book contains — and how much of truth each contains — I recommend this Wired post, and this very short post from Lt. Col. Jim Cannon, who’s the inspiration for the Jeff Bridges character in the movie. I won’t judge you.

But know that the film itself doesn’t really bother with the truth. Jim Cannon becomes Jeff Bridges’ Lt. Col. Bill Django, who survives a bullet wound in Vietnam with the epiphany that if the Army can harness its soldiers’ desire not to kill, it can develop a dominant force of psychic spies and superheroes — Jedis — that can patrol the earth through the force of their harnessed enlightenment, providing peace through stealthy strength. (Re-named for jazz legend Django Reinhardt, get it???) Poor Mike Echanis’ role in Cannon’s First Earth Battalion — or, as the film would have it, Django’s New Earth Army — gets carved up and distributed into a variety of roles, primarily George Clooney’s sad-clown Lyn Cassady, who wanders the Middle East keeping the Jedi tradition alive, Obi-Wan-like, until he takes in his young Padawan, Ewan MacGregor’s Bob Wilton, a journalist heartbroken after a messy divorce. Echanis, during his character’s brief cameo in the film, indeed lifts the sandbags, but with his scrotum. None of this really corresponds to the book, and the book doesn’t really correspond to the truth. (Or does it???) The less sense you allow the movie to make, the happier you’ll be.

That’s half of what the movie wants you to take away: Just do your thing! The New Earth Army isn’t like the rest of the snake-eaters at Ft. Bragg. While the squares drill, Django’s men have a classic-rock dance party, all freak-out long hair and the-Dude-abides mustaches. They master the art of seeing through solid objects and try to intuit the location of kidnapped diplomats through unlocking their minds. And while Django eventually gets betrayed and heads off into exile — presumably to some smoky swamp on Dagobah — he instructs Cassady to continue the work. Jedis are betrayed by the Empire, but the path of enlightenment can never be truly blocked. The Force will find a way to be with you.

The problem with the movie is that other half. All this freaky absurdity gets buried under a lumbering storytelling structure that mitigates its intensity, like the sarcophagus the Soviets built to contain Chernobyl. The story is told through Wilton, a small-town reporter who tries to get into Iraq in 2003 in search of distraction, adventure and jilted-lover vengeance. He chances across Cassady, who sees the Force is strong in this one. They take a madcap trip across Iraq as Cassady instructs Wilton in the ways of the Jedi, told in fits through flashbacks and even flashbacks within flashbacks. None of the adventure is actually related to the Jedi story. The best that can be said about this device is that it’s cheeky to watch a bewildered MacGregor, who played Obi-Wan in the Star Wars prequels, learn about the Force from George Clooney.

But the structure can’t conceal the fact that nothing about the film — and about the underlying story of the New Earth Army/First Earth Battalion — makes sense. After all the California hot-tubbing, the shamanic Django/Cannon is still building an army. Echanis didn’t go to Nicaragua in search of enlightenment. He went there, he explained, because it was just too difficult to walk down the streets of the U.S. and get into a fistfight. Walking through walls and invisibility and rocking out to the first Boston LP and goat-staring are just cooler methods of, eventually, killing people. The Jedi sort of work for the Empire here. When Cassady stumbles upon a detainee who’s subjected to deafening sonic booms of the Barney The Purple Dinosaur theme tune, he quiveringly murmurs something about “the dark side.” Well, hell, soldier, did you think you were joining an ashram?

You can get really tendentious going down this path. Is the Iraq war the dark side of the Force? Is the Force actually in the hands of the Sith? Is this all really an allegory for the consequences of military fantasies? If you stare too long at the goat, does the goat also stare at you?

But why bother. To truly be a Jedi, the story instructs, you must free yourself of psychically burdensome things like coherence and narrative and veracity. Embrace the universe’s free play of freaky being-ness and Special Forces officers with braided ponytails. Use the Force. And then, when someone least expects it, jab a knife into his neck.