Avant-garde film comment on young men going to war

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2015)

Cult director Kubrick constructed an on point statement on adolescent men that have to find their place in a social system called war and its preparation. In the first half of the movie Kubrick deconstructs a recruitment camp and their inhabitants brilliantly by focusing on revealing the personality of the drill instructor and his men. We see how the young men react to the manipulations of their personality and how they give up their individuality to become the perfect soldier. The film shows this in reduced and clear photography. The rhythm is slow but intense through the sensible tension between the struggling boys and the drill instructor. The dialogue lines of Sergeant Hartman and the marines became widely quoted pop culture, mainly because of their sharpness and irony: the viewer is irritated if this is comic, cynical or sad. In the second half we see what war is like. The director shows a world where death of the enemy is a permanent decoration and the fraternization of field soldiers became the last moral compass. The protagonists meander in a hopeless room (the fragments of an urban battle ground) accompanied by the sound of the lonely squeaking of steel hinges. The marines found their role: they got rid of fear and became killing machines.