10

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2008)

This movie is living proof that the now-dead Stanley Kubrick left the earth too soon. Full Metal Jacket is the greatest army movie of all time and actors like R. Lee Ermey, Matthew Modine and Vincent D'Onofrio are the perfect additions. What makes this so perfect is that the movie looks at the basic training component of the army life and then produces a pretty good segway into the actual wartime situation. I don't know of any other director that did it that way (it also had its risks because Kubrick had to ensure some kind of transfer to the war scenes). He executed it perfectly but what I like most about it was Modine and his character. He's obviously built for the army life, yet is military occupation is journalist. Gomer Pyle proved his worth with a loaded rifle but he took things a little too far. The other thing about Kubrick's direction is that everything was somewhere between good and perfect. Ermey's character was hilarious in the opening scenes where he's yelling at the recruits and I couldn't think of any other way to open up. But the most interesting part was how he was able to use a little less than half the movie to show what the recruits' life was like on the training base in South Carolina then make the transformation to Vietnam. The only strange thing here is that when the recruits are in Vietnam, Joker moves up to the rank of Sergeant, which is not possible immediately after basic.