A masterpiece with Kubrick's ultimate judgment on mankind

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2000)

A masterpiece of a great artist is like a universe where one can find uncountable different deep themes and significant ideas. Here I venture my personal interpretation of "Full Metal Jacket", a masterpiece of the great artist Stanley Kubrick.
In my opinion, Kubrick makes use of this movie to pronounce his ultimate sentence on the human species: an utter condemnation worthy of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". Yes, there is a war with people assailing each other like rabid dogs. But this is not a justification. Men are not loathsome assassins because there is a war: war exists because men are this way.
Through his own gelid, documentary eye, Kubrick shows us mankind at work, meanwhile ruthlessly judging it, like Gulliver in the land of the wise horses. Are we supposed to hate the satanic drill sergeant? Why? He just does his job, which is to destroy personalities, to turn men into machines. And notice that the consequence of this alienation is not to create better soldiers: all this is done because that's the sergeant's job, because that's human life.
Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is the guy who tries to preserve his freedom of conscience and of criticism. Yet the viewer is brought to have an instinctive dislike for the fellow, and in fact the director depicts him with no sympathy. After all, he is a shirker and his continuous jokes are not funny at all. We ask why he doesn't share the sufferings of other soldiers. Perhaps, since he has brain? And who cares intelligence in hell? Indeed, when Joker is (justly) rebuked by a general for his uniform (with pacifist symbols, slogans etc.), he cuts a very poor, ridiculous figure, clumsily showing his dubious academic learning on philosophy, sociology or what is. In conclusion, Joker is a man, the same lousy stuff as others. Of course, women are nothing better: see the two Viet prostitutes, with their exhilarating lines.
"Full Metal Jacket" has enormous merits. The visual effects are fantastic, as always in Kubrick's movies. The escalation of psychological violence in the boot camp and the sense of derangement of soldiers in Vietnam are represented with powerful art. The whole film is pervaded by a grotesque, sardonic humor which is like the sneer of the hell. Which most amazes me is that the director was able to turn obscene talk (which I normally abhor) into true art: in my humble opinion, not even Rabelais succeeded in this exploit.
Often the greatest works of art have some minor faults (Dostoewskij's major novels are plenty of defects, for instance). Let me remark a pair of flaws of the film. When the marines are shot by the sniper, we see squids of blood in slow-motion. This is Peckinpah's visionary style of representing violence, which grates much with the cold-blooded documentary-like style, Kubrick's trade-mark, which we find in the remainder of the movie. Moreover: some puns in soldiers' talk, and in fact the most obscene and disgusting, are too brilliantly elaborated to appear authentic: everyone, who has spent a period as a conscript, knows that bright wit is not common goods inside the barracks.
"Full Metal Jacket" is both a terrible and profound masterpiece. It deserves a major place in the history of cinema.