Kubrick's dehumanising, demoralising account of war

Rating: 7/10 (20 November 2007)

Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is an interesting film. Not the director's best film, nor the best Vietnam war film either.
The film gives us an interesting 20 minute introduction, as we see how the young army recruits endure a boot-camp hell through training and pervasive verbal abuse from a hellish drill instructor played finely by Lee Ermey who reminds the marines that they are 'all equally useless'. The training is intense, the discipline is maximum - this causes one overweight recruit to finally blow his brains out from being psyched out by the pervasive drill instructor.
What is important, and Kubrick shows us this is the process of dehumanisation that so many young men undergo, so they can go kill other innocent people for an aimless reason. We are shown, the horrors of the war through Private Joker, as he embarks on a journey which takes in deserted places.
Kubrick frequently shows us the effects of war on man. In a scene, where Private Joker is on a helicopter, he observes a soldier menacingly fire the automatic weapon at women down below on the rice fields - the man later exclaims; 'ain't war hell?'.
Two criticisms I have for this film are, number one, it does not possess the gritty, realistic environment of Vietnam that films like 'Platoon', 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Deer Hunter' possess. The second criticism is the film's small stories, some of them which are masterful, but others which are slow and inconclusive.
However, Full Metal Jacket possesses some gritty and effectively shot sequences accompanied with a pumping soundtrack - one thing that Kubrick cannot be criticised for is his choice of music. In every of his films, he seems to pick the perfect music.
The profanities in the film, which are frequent and coarse, are in many ways important in accentuating distress, fear and boredom.
Kubrick's FMJ is a worthy addition to the war genre; it is in many ways a unique and powerful film, but ultimately fails to amount to the harrowing mastery of other Vietnam films.
In the last scene, where Private Joker walks through ruins with other members of the platoon, he narrates to us that he can't wait to go home an have a 'home f*ck'... I leave it at that
7/10