'Full Metal Jacket' is an intense yet darkly funny war film that continues to force us to question the duality of man as Joker so delicately put it.

Rating: 10/10 (12 August 2015)

After five years spent making 'The Shining', Stanley Kubrick decided to venture once again into the war genre. This time, the focus is on the Vietnam war in 1967, centering on a group of marines going through intense bootcamp and traveling overseas to fight. Adapted from Gustav Harsford's book 'The Short Timers', Kubrick has concocted a masterpiece of war with deep themes of humanity and the struggles to be good and evil. The film itself plays out like a two-act play with half of the film taking place inside the first day of bootcamp, going through graduation. The latter half is war itself as we follow one particular marine with the handle of 'Joker' (Matthew Modine).
Set to the excellent music of the 60s, we see America's youths getting every strand of hair from the hair cut off. I think Kubrick wanted to show us how our humanity is basically stripped and taken away once we enter the military so we can be reborn and trained again as a vicious killer in order to keep the peace. It's quite ironic, as 'Joker' states in the middle of the film when he is questioned on why he has a peace symbol on his marine helmet. He answers with, "It's supposed to suggest the duality of man."
And Kubrick wanted to show Joker's journey as he sees both the good and bad in humanity. A lot of people say that the first half of the film that takes place at bootcamp is the better part of the film if not the only part of the film you need to watch. And while it is quite fun to watch Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) yell at everyone for the better part of an hour, the actual war shows us just how some marines take to the atrocities of war. Some are sadistic, some are funny, and some are cautious.
But when faced with the most extreme circumstances, our basic human instincts are usually the same. It's what keeps us moving forward as Kubrick shows in the final moments of this brilliant war film. And Kubrick's inclusion of all the actual Mickey Mouse songs and props were genius throughout the film. It was a subtle way to show us that in fact the marines thought this war and evil was indeed crap, hence the term Mickey Mouse was used as slang to describe something as amateur. And add to that all the marching and singing in the Mickey Mouse Show and it standing for American, Kubrick was on to something here, showing us through visuals and singing this theme song what we all really thought of the war as an entire city burns to the ground.
It's truly a remarkable film with some damn fine performances by Modine and Ermey, but a little known actor at the time by the name of Vincent D'Onofrio delivers one of the best performances of that year and is still most recognized for this movie today (other than playing Thor in 'Adventures in Babysitting'). But his character Pvt. Pyle goes through such an intense time, that D'Onofrio transforms into something unrecognizable from when we first meet him with a smile he can't seem to remove. It's one of the more powerful scenes in cinema when we see Pvt. Pyle for the last time. 'Full Metal Jacket' is an intense yet darkly funny war film that continues to force us to question the duality of man as Joker so delicately put it. And Kubrick's camera-work, once again is the best there is.