Review: Full Metal Jacket (1987) · 12:09am Feb 4th, 2016

It is often said that making a truly anti-war film is impossible. That in showing the act of war, we glamorize it.

Well, apparently Stanley Kubrick didn't get that memo, because Full Metal Jacket shows just how horribly unglamorous and inglorious warfare can be, all while filtered through an almost sarcastic, deeply impersonal filter.

Kubrick divides his two-hour war film into two sections, and those two seconds are, in many ways, almost entirely different kinds of movies, yet fit together surprisingly well. The first half of the film focuses on the horrific and dehumanizing training that marines undergo in preparation to turn a bunch of dorky, ineffectual slackers into killing machines, and how the very system itself steadily dehumanizes and numbs people until they either crack under the pressure, or simply slide into an apathy and submit.

This first half is almost filmed like a documentary, with Kubrick's camera maintaining a detached sense of unbiased observation, simply letting the actions of the sociopathic and horrendously abusive Drill Sargent Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), who seems to take an almost sadistic level of pleasure out of watching his recruits bend to his every whim. Screaming and shouting a continual spew of increasingly destructive insults and mockery, Ermey's drill sergeant becomes some sort of horrific monster personification of hyper masculinity, determined to destroy anything resembling meekness or gentleness in his recruits.

The central target of Hartman's attacks is Vincent D'Onofrio's Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence. Obviously slow-witted and far too overweight to properly met the rigorous physical standards of a marine, he quickly becomes the focus of Hartman's abuse, and the film steadily tracks his steady mental decay over the first hour of the film. D'Onofrio embodies this portly vulnerability and steadily over flowing levels of rage and frustration until, in a scene that feels extracted from some sort of horror film, he finally snaps, and kills Hartman and himself in a surreal fever dream of a sequence, drenched in blue lighting and with Vivian Kubrick's (credited under the alias of Abigail Mead) disturbing synthesizer pulsing underneath.

After this, the film abruptly jumps ahead, and the focus shifts to D'Onofrio's fellow recruit, and self righteous snarker, James T. "Joker" Davis, played by Matthew Modine. From his first scene, Modine's character carries with him an aura of self righteous apathy, yet at the same time, seems to hold secretive bleeding heart (and strangely naive) views on human nature. Once stationed in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968, he treats the entire war as if it's some sort of amusing game to him, just traipsing along as part of the press division of the Marines, continually holding himself with a vague sense of pride above his fellow marines.

The film then steadily proceeds to deconstruct his pride, by showing the war as an unglamorious, stark affair with no eoic battles or confrontations. Instead, the war is made up of bursts of explosive violence, separated by lackadaisical waiting for the next order, often spent bargaining with suspiciously thin looking local prostitutes, or simply hanging around and talking. Kubrick films these sections with an equally detached aura, at times taking on the feel of a documentary. His camera steadily tracking through the bombed out ruins of the city of Huế, Kubrick's detachment actually makes the combat more immersive, as the lack of visible agenda or bias instead allows the horrific nature of war to stand on it's own. Here, in this hellish world of concrete and fire, men are reduced to stripped down shells of people, their minds singularly set on destroying an enemy they can't even see most of the time.

In many ways, this stripping down of humanity is reflected in the stripped down aesthetic of the film. Far from the gothic horror of The Shining or the strange dreamlike meditation of Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket instead presents the imagery of war in a raw, unvarnished starkness. No surging music, nor catchy pop-hooks to distract the audience during the combat, Kubrick instead simply lets the battle sequences play out, stripping it of the glamour or romanticisim that often shows up in the war film genre. In a way, it's almost like a prelude to the genre reconfiguration that Spielberg's WW2 epic Saving Private Ryan did for war films. Both films present war as a gristly horrific affair, and where's Spielberg was blessed to have a war between good and evil as his back drop, Kubrick instead chooses the ultimate futile war of American history, and an ultimate example of how humanity loves to self destruct.

So yes, I feel this is truly one of the great war films, right up there with Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now, and most certainly an antidote to the pretentious self righteous rambling of Oliver Stone's work.

5 out of 5 stars.