True,dialectic,transcendent.

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 1999)

This movie is very important to me , because it shows the world exactly in the way I often feel about it.Truly,bitter,no moralizing titi-picture. First:This is no anti-war-movie. Kubrick is much too clever to bore the audience with one-perspective-"truth".Quoting Joker:"I live in a world of s**t, yes, but I am alive and not feared anymore"(I think so..). The "s**t" is the central symbol of the movie. S**t is like blood, sperm,tears a very human product and should make think man of itself as an animal , no godlike being.(Have you ever seen a good s**ting?) When Private Pyle commits suicide and falls on the toilet he has left the "rottencrotch"-world of s**t, the only way out. There is no outside in this picture, no good normality, the marines drill, the war is total. Kubrick always wanted to achieve a perfect ambiguity and here he made it. The look is very realistic, documentary style,but there are also this stilized tracking shots, an ambivalent look. The pictures have a transparent quality and you associate other pictures: In school, at work, where the mechanism aren``t so different. Everybody new someone like Private Pyle at school , all against one, not because it was evil, no moralizing please, it is easier to survive in the group. .Joker may be free to think about what he sees, but he is still a member of the world-of-s**t-club-earth and behaves like one. An allegory,sure. The modern socialisation in the marine camp is necessary (!) to learn how to survive in modern world, which can be represented in the metaphor of war very well. This picture is transcendent. But it doesn`t look like it, here it has a rare brilliance. I would like to contact other Kubrick-Junkies worldwide. Be warned, my English is bad.Have a nice day.