Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1987, 116 minutes

There have been many movies made about the Vietnam war, from epics like Apocalypse Now, to the worthy Platoon and The Deer Hunter. However, nobody managed to show the dehumanising effect of war as memorably as Stanley Kubrick did with Full Metal Jacket.

The first half of the film takes place in a basic training camp; new recruits are moulded into fearless killing automata, and their individuality is crushed in the cogs of the war machine, pushing them to the point of unquestioning obedience. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. The film focuses upon two recruits, Privates “Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio) and “Joker” (Matthew Modine), who don’t react quite as expected. We watch as Pyle slowly sinks into an introverted psychosis while Joker simply becomes more and more cynical as the movie continues. The second half of the film takes place months later in Vietnam, following Private Joker, now a combat correspondant, through a war zone.

The first thing that really separates Full Metal Jacket from the others is its somewhat bizarre structure, being in two distinct halves, a definite before and after. It’s the darkly funny and entirely disturbing first half that makes it so brilliant and so different from almost any other war movie. The intense degradation and debasement to which the new recruits are subjected is at once amusing and terrifying. The excellent casting of ex-marine R. Lee Ermey as the barking, brutal drill instructor Sgt. Hartman, created one of the most enduring figures of 1980s cinema whose influence is clear in Starship Troopers and The Frighteners where Ermey performs an excellent self parody.

Full Metal Jacket isn’t as surreal and overtly sinister as Apocalypse Now, and because of this its effect is much more unsettling. The evil isn’t confined to an insane man in the deepest jungles; it’s in everyone consumed by war.

Review by George Williamson
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2004