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Ewan McGregor adopts a US accent to play Bob Wilton — a fictional US stand-in for John Ronson, who fate forces into an overseas adventure that finds him exploring the stranger side of the US military. The personal end of his story, which bears no resemblance to Ronson's life, adds little to the film. Ronson's identity as a writer is a lot more interesting than the one McGregor is being asked to perform here. Troubled by a serious romantic break-up, Wilton heads out to Iraq in an attempt to cover the government contractors in Iraq. Along the way he stumbles onto Lyn Cassady — a man who turns out to have been an accomplished member of the First Earth Battalion. Evidently, in the movie, the US accepted the idea of creating a group of peaceful warrior monks and kept it top secret. The Hollywood character who succeeds where a real-life Jim Channon failed is Bill Django — thoughtfully played by Jeff Bridges. The fictionalized success of the project allows for a simplified history of paranormal research in the military that makes way for an easy dynamic between Django, his star pupil Cassady, and Casday's rival Larry Hooper, played by Kevin Spacey. This is all well and good — it provides a nice story for audiences to follow that serves as a solid, human perspective on its non-fiction elements. The problem is that the film spends way too much of its time on these things and ends up traveling pretty far away from the jumble of different fascinating elements that make the book so interesting in the first place.

The film does chronicle some elements of the corruption and twisting of Channon's First Earth Battalion dream into something far darker, but with so much going on in the foreground, there isn't enough focus on it to come across all that coherently. We're lost in a story of a fictional Ewan McGregor character trying to find himself and help heroically save the fictional Bob Wilton character from himself. The real-life warping of the dream came across with much more interesting stories than what's illustrated here. The convoluted distortions found in the book are really fascinating and would've been really interesting to follow in rapid-cut voice over narrations that would not have compromised the Hollywood feel of the film at all.

The book follows lines of causality from Channon's dream, to weird remote viewing techniques by military personnel who are honorably discharged and end up on the Art Bell show, ultimately resulting in a mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997. More illustrations of that sort of darkness would've been interesting. While a more disjointed plot would have compromised the standard Hollywood plot structure of the film, correct handling of a less cohesive script that covered more of Ronson's material would've resulted in a film that would've been a beautiful fusion of a traditional Hollywood film with something far more breathtaking than what we end up with here.

The Verdict

While lacking in a central plot, Ronson's book does a brilliant job of weaving together disparate pieces of information into a thoroughly interesting tapestry, which vividly brings across the story of a good idea corrupted by chance and circumstance. The film could have done a faithful adaptation of the spirit of that book with a close approximation of the storytelling style without compromising the standard Hollywood approach to storytelling too much. Screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Grant Heslov instead force the nonfiction elements of the story into a very traditional plot structure that fails to capture the scope of the book so consistently that it hardly seems worth the time and effort put into it. The saddest part about this is the fact that the film had some really great talent that could've done a really good job of bringing a less traditional script to the screen with the kind of Hollywood appeal it would've needed to sell tickets. Instead, we're left with a mess that's not particularly appealing to anyone. It'll probably turn a small profit in the long run, but it's not going to make the kind of money a truly interesting script would've been able to manage with a cast like this.

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