A war film to beat them all

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2018)

Firstly I have to tell you two things...Firstly I rate this as my all time top film so I may be a tad biased and secondly this year is really the first year that I became a reviewer and this review marks my 100th review so reserved this for my top film do it.
Well the film is spit into two with the first half we are at marine training and the 2nd half actually In Vietnam.
Directed by the fabulous Stanley Kubrick and with many not so famous actors but some of the best acting around, you could not have seen a better film. The first half has you laughing in part but incredibly sad at the way some of these marines are brought up to fighting status. In particular we see one man totally broken by it and this takes us to a harrowing scene and the beginning of the second half.
What we get in the second half is not a massive amount of action and it kinda follows around 5 main characters that have survived the humiliation, gutsy training and sheer brutality in the first half. They with their patrol come across an isolated small battle for their life and that's both physical and mental and for me with the score one of great mental horror...a simple scene but so damned powerful and strong.
This film was actually 98% filmed around 3 miles from my home in London England along the Thames in Docklands where a regeneration programme to build new homes was taking place...I could actually hear the bombs going of when they were filming it and didn't know what it was till I saw it mentioned in local news.
It's frickin awesome, powerful, sad, angry and as I said one of the best war films there are....