This movie does not "fall apart at the end" as some say

Rating: 10/10 (14 June 2000)

I'm a big fan of Kubrick. His movies tend to have subtexts that are not readily apparent.
A theme he keeps revisiting in his films is that of entropy, or the way a system can break down. Witness HAL in 2001: A Space Oddyssey, and the "military/political system" in Dr. Strangelove. It takes but a small thing to set destruction in motion.
This one is similar, where the tightly regimented robot soldiers leave the camp all clean cut and organized, but later the story trails off into a non-standard, open and disarrayed ending that parallels the reality of the lack of closure such things have in real life. Stories are ususally handed to us in nice, digestable packets, but the narrative here falls apart just like the military unit does.
I think it is intentional.