Kubrick: "The most difficult and challenging thing about directing a film is getting out of the car."

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 2003)

Spoilers.
Perhaps Kubrick doesn't deserve quite as much credit as some people give him. I think he was basically a translator. He never created. He would become intrigued by ideas and characters from great novels then use his expertise as a film-maker to share them with us.
Kubrick's greatest talent was in the editing and composition of his shots. This talent was fully developed by the time he made Dr. Strangelove' and was at its peak when he made Barry Lyndon.' I am convinced that by the time he made Full Metal Jacket,' Kubrick wasn't interested in trying to improve his abilities. He became lazy and merely relied on them.
I think Kubrick's tiredness as a film-maker is one of the things this film represents. It is a good film and it is unconventional enough to be distinctly his work. But what it lacks is the visual flare his other films have. It could be argued that this was deliberate, but I don't believe it was. The Stedicam work in the first scene is exceptionally well done and there are a few other shots in the film that are just as good. The visual look of the rest of the film is mediocre.
The two things in this film that are as good as his earlier work are the dialogue and the performances. Their work is very interesting. It is so interesting that one feels compelled to watch the film again and again, trying to make complete sense of it. The fascinating thing is that you never can. There is always something new to discover. This is what separates Kubrick's work from mainstream cinema. You never get bored.

Despite this, there are a number of scenes that I think didn't work exactly the way Kubrick had intended. One of them is the scene where Alice tells Bill about the Naval officer. Perhaps the point of this scene is to illustrate that sexual desire can cause people to lose all self control. If this was in fact what was intended, then I think it is supposed to act as a shock that reawakens Bill's own desire to have sex with other women. He then begins the exploration of his own sexuality. This is a good idea in theory. The problem is that the scene is very weak, which doesn't give Bill's reaction much credibility, especially since Alice was stoned when she made the confession.
Another scene that I think doesn't work very well is Alice's explanation of her dream. I think you would have to rely too much on old-fashioned Freudian dream interpretation to find the true meaning of this scene. One could be very astute and come up with several interpretations, but I think it stretched logic a bit, which again didn't give the scene much credibility.

Excluding these two scenes, I would say that the film is very intriguing. It was interesting to watch a supposedly happy marriage being compromised by sexual fantasy, which is a subject not many films deal with. It is easy to understand why a man like Kubrick was interested in the material.