A good first half that is bogged down by a meandering and pallid second one lacking a sense of urgency

Rating: Null/10 (26 November 2008)

I know FMJ is widely lauded as a war movie classic, but I thought it was surprisingly weak. Is it because I saw Klimov's monstrous and harrowing WWII war film COME AND SEE the night before and FMJ inevitably suffers by comparison, even without me trying to force one? Could be. But I thought a relatively good (not great) first half is bogged down by a meandering and pallid second one that scavenges the ruins of Vietnam in search of meaning and momentum and comes up with canned one-liners.
Kubrick suffuses the second half with notions of false bravado and how American aggressiveness brushes off in young freshcuts. I didn't find any of it much riveting though, probably because the ideas are too damn obvious. I mean, if there's a more potent symbol for gung-ho right-wing patriotism to make fun of than John Wayne then I sure don't know about it. Now, I'm not one to suggest subtlety is the only way to go about in war movies. After all I love FIRES ON THE PLAIN and COME AND SEE and neither one is quite the epitome of that. I like being grabbed by the neck and plunged headlong in the grime and brutality and told SEE. I just don't think FMJ's politics were particularly successful.
And then you have the faux-interviews of the soldiers when one of them starts talking about how they're not fighting for freedom and how it's a slaughter and maybe they're shooting at the wrong *beep* Is Kubrick poking fun at war-is-hell genre conventions? That may very well be so even though I don't believe it. But what exactly is the point in that? I think what the second half severely lacks is a sense of urgency and foreboding, a sense of progression to a fateful conclusion. They're all laughing and teasing the Vietnamese hooker with the black guy's alabama snake in one scene, and in the next they're getting shot at by a sniper. Just a succession of scenes strung together in a haphazard manner. APOCALYPSE NOW is similarly constructed as a series of scenes that depict the American dream gatecrashing and being gatecrashed by the war but there's that sense of urgency that makes it riveting.