'If the drill sergeant catches us here, we'll be in a world of s***'

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2002)

'I *am*... in a world... of s***...'
First of all, contrary to what someone on here said, the term 'full metal jacket' doesn't stand for a fully loaded weapon, it's a type of ammunition that, not surprisingly, possesses a hard metal jacket that encloses the soft lead core of the bullet.
Now to the movie. It's one of the three best war movies I have seen, the others being Das Boot and Saving Private Ryan. It's not an anti-war movie per se, meaning that it doesn't carry any misguided pacifist message (neither do the other two movies i mentioned). A good war movie, in my opinion, doesn't really deal with the question of whether war is good or bad, it deals with portraying the reality of fighting in a war as a soldier. And from that, anyone with a brain can deduce what war is for the men fighting - horror. I don't think anyone needs a movie to tell them that huge masses of men shooting each other to death is bad. Wars have their reasons, some of them need to be fought. The merits of the Vietnam war are of course very much up for debate, but this movie doesn't take part in that debate.
What it does is show the experiences of young men drafted into a war, it shows how military training tries to shape machines out of human beings, and it shows how those men/machines react in a combat situation. The first half is more watchable, yes, but I think the fact that the second part in Vietnam is really disjointed and patchy is actually very crucial - Joker finds himself through the training, he's now a trained killing machine. He, and the audience expect action. What Kubrick delivers is chaos, men sitting around one moment, then fighting and killing the next, never clear on the reason, never reaching catharsis. I really really doubt a perfectionist of the order of Kubrick would simply let a movie 'slip', as some have said. I think this is how it was meant to be. And I think Kubrick made the right move. 9/10.