There are losses in every trade

Rating: 8/10 (5 October 2007)

"Full Metal Jacket" (the title is taken from a type of ammunition) is a film of two unequal halves. In Act I we follow a platoon of US Marines through their basic training at a military base in South Carolina as they prepare to fight in Vietnam. This part of the film is dominated by Lee Ermey who plays Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the man charged with licking the raw recruits into shape. As I have never served in any branch of the services, I cannot say from experience whether the picture given of military life in this film is accurate, but as Ermey was himself a sergeant in the Marine Corps and was originally hired as a technical consultant rather than an actor, his portrayal of Hartman is presumably drawn from life.
Hartman is not only a strict disciplinarian but also a foul-mouthed bully who sees it as his job to make the recruits' life hell. He has a particularly fertile imagination when it comes to insults; no category of abuse, be it scatological, sexual, racial or blasphemous, is too disgusting for him to use. Although he says that all the recruits are equally worthless in his eyes, this is not strictly true. Some are more worthless than others, especially the overweight, unfit and incompetent Private Gomer Pyle, for whom he reserves his choicest abuse. (Pyle's real name is Leonard Lawrence, but Hartman has a habit of renaming those whom he dislikes; a black Marine becomes Private Snowball).
Hartman's methods are presumably approved by the military as the best means of maintaining discipline and moulding the platoon into a fighting unit, but in this case they misfire. Hartman has promised to make the men into "ministers of death". In the case of Pyle this prophecy is fulfilled, but those whom he kills are Hartman and himself when he is goaded beyond endurance. There are a number of arguments against conscription, and this film encapsulates one of the strongest. Hartman says that his orders are "to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps", and in normal times a recruit as unsuited to military life as Pyle would doubtless have been weeded out at the end of his first week, but during the Vietnam war the military needed every man it could get, regardless of quality. Although Pyle is a murderer and suicide, he remains a character we can pity, bringing to mind Kipling's words in "Thrown Away":-
"Some- there are losses in every trade- Will break their hearts ere bitted and made, Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard, And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard".
In Act II the action moves to Vietnam, where we follow another member of the platoon, Private Joker, the only man who attempted to befriend Pyle. Joker is employed as a journalist on a military newspaper, but is frustrated with his job, which he sees as dishonest, slanted reporting for propaganda purposes. (His situation is similar to that of Robin Williams' radio DJ in "Good Morning Vietnam", another film from the same year). He wants to see some military action, and gets his wish when he is sent to report upon the battle for the city of Hue during the Tet offensive. Remarkably, the whole film was shot in Britain, with the London docklands standing in for Hue and the Norfolk Broads for the Vietnamese countryside.
When I described this as a film of two unequal halves, I was referring not only to length (Act I takes up rather less than, and Act II rather more than, half of the total running time) but also to quality. Act I, with its two great performances from Ermey and Vincent d'Onofrio as Pyle, is a superb piece of work, both as a critique of the military mindset and as a human drama, and the equal of anything else in Kubrick's output. Act II, although it is a perfectly competent war film, is not in the same class. Despite obvious differences of subject-matter and style, the film reminded me of another Kubrick film, "Lolita", which also starts much more effectively than it finishes. (In that case, much of the blame lies with Vladimir Nabokov's source novel).
"Full Metal Jacket" formed part of what might be called Hollywood's second Vietnam cycle of the late eighties and early nineties, which also included not only "Good Morning Vietnam", but also "Hamburger Hill", "Casualties of War" and Oliver Stone's trilogy of "Platoon", "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Heaven and Earth". The first Vietnam cycle ("The Deer Hunter", "Coming Home", "Apocalypse Now") had come about a decade earlier. Most of these films had a generally anti-war tone, showing the war as brutal and savage, but generally did not analyse its political causes in any great depth.
It was not, therefore, a terribly original move to make a Vietnam war film in 1987, and originality- the ability to make films quite different from anything else, such as "Dr Strangelove" or "Clockwork Orange"- was generally Kubrick's strong suit. He could work within an established genre, as with the sword-and-sandal epic "Spartacus", but that film is perhaps the best example of that genre ever made. The action scenes in "Full Metal Jacket" are well done, and Matthew Modine is good as Joker, as is Alec Baldwin as the brutal soldier Animal Mother, but Kubrick does not really find anything new to say about the war which had not already been said by the likes of Cimino, Coppola and Stone. 8/10. (An average; 9/10 for Act I, 7/10 for Act II).