A masterful war film

Rating: 9/10 (26 February 2015)

"This is my riffle. There are many like it but this one is mine". This cue could encompass this excellent movie released in 1987. Eight years after the end of the Vietnam War, Stanley Kubrick decided to depict it in a very original way, by representing the war as a tragic love story between a man and his weapon.
The film is divided in two complementary parts. The first one focuses on a training camp, in which we follow a young man nicknamed "Joker" discovering the life in a barrack, and being bullied and humiliated by his sergeant. It is a transcription of the human relationships that appear when a hundred men renounce to think by themselves, which leads to terrible consequences. The second part shows Joker covering the Vietnam War as a correspondent for the newspaper "Stars and Stripes". We follow him from the rear to the very front, so we can confront the views of different unconventional characters about their situation.
The originality in Kubrick's film is that he doesn't present the war as a hell where human are sent to being slaughtered, on the contrary of the majority of war films: blood is here considered as a God. And the dichotomy in the structure permits to distinguish the dogmatic part (the training) and the fanatic one (the fight). This religious presentation of the situation implies that the film is not the story of one person discovering the war: it's a real fresco of the soldiers. We are confronted to the ones who live killing, the ones who are disgusted, the ones who have become mac because they couldn't stand what they were doing Blood is omnipresent, as a powerful and evil character.
But the most important and stunning part of Kubrick's work is that he manages to transcribe the atmosphere of this very odd period, split between the horror of the war and the societal progresses of the sixties. The film is a superposition of contrasts, between good and bad, silence and noise, color and gray, calmness and violence For example, Kubrick's alters long shots and very rapid cuts to oppose the cohesion and the hatred between soldiers. The music, that is nearly absent of the movie, appears once in the second part and is in total contradiction with the horror of the images shown. The paroxysm of those contrasts is when the soldiers joke about John Wayne on the battlefield.
So in summary, Kubrick's movie mixes human relations, numerous representations of soldiers, a stunning direction Definitely a masterpiece.