Easily one of the best war movies of all time, and certainly one of my favorite Kubrick films.

Rating: 9/10 (11 February 2017)

Full Metal Jacket states its primary concern fairly loud: Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is grilled for wearing a peace pin on his combat uniform while having "Born to Kill" scrawled across his helmet. He responds that it is a comment on the duality of man, warring and peaceable. The film reflects this two-sided dilemma with a two-part story. The dialogue in both sections is a constant clash between the inflating, propagandistic, and sickly comic language of professional soldiering (aided by the immensely foul-mouthed drill sergeant Hartman, played by former Marine sergeant R. Lee Ermey) and Joker's more self- preserving enterprises, first as the tutor of the inept Pyle and then as the journalist reluctantly covering the military perspective of the war and just as reluctant. He is never truly the vicious fighter the Marines want him to be, but he is every bit as detestable as his more unthinking counterparts. Kubrick's particularly effective stroke was to purposefully ignore the politics of Vietnam and keep both sides of this generalized central conflict right in your face. Kubrick works expressly on this level of the individual and unspecialized grunt to create a film that is less a defense or criticism of war than a strike at the mythologies of war-making. In its constant and irreversible violence, Full Metal Jacket, one of Kubrick's grittiest works, is also one of his most resonant.