Marines in the microscope

Rating: Null/10 (7 July 1999)

Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaker blessed by a brilliant eye and cursed by an overly analytical mind. The result is a film legacy that is beautiful yet cold, exciting yet distant, hypnotic yet detached.
The people and characters populating Kubrick's movies are simply tools that act like slides under a microscope. They exist to help explore issues, such as violence or de-humanization, that intrigued the director. Fleshed-out characters that emotionally attracted audiences were shunned -- they distracted us from the bigger issues. Given his goals, it's no coincide that Kubrick's most memorable and tragic character is a deranged and homicidal machine. The film's star was always Stanley, and Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal or Keir Dullea always ran in second place.
Reviewing his concerns and style, Full Metal Jacket stands as a definitive Kubrick project. It's a beautifully shot film with a camera that glides effortlessly as it follows Private Joker (Matthew Modine) through Marine boot camp and Viet Nam. It deals with war and dehumanization, two of Kubrick's main themes, and features the amazing draftee-abusing talents of real-life Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Emery as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Emery landed the role by keeping up a barrage of swearing for 15 minutes while crew members pelted him with tennis balls. Tim Colceri, originally slated to play the role, was bumped to the bit part of the crazed helicopter gunner.
But while the characters are interesting to watch, we come away from Full Metal Jacket not caring about them. There's none of the emotional investment we get with the grunts in Apocalypse Now, Platoon or the Deer Hunter. And that's very intentional. The killing, whoring and fighting is all displayed with a strange detachment. All Kubrick's soldiers spout military jargon or hollow bravado in flat, deliberate voices. In several scenes, the camera simply pivot as individual troops successively mouth one Soldier of Fortune cliche after another. The teenagers from small towns in Iowa, Kansas and Oregon have become transformed into killer bugs on view under Kubrick's microscope.