Liberal Caricatures of Marines & Bad Over-acting

Rating: 4/10 (18 February 2016)

Full Metal Jacket is a leftist oriented movie about a fictional group of Marines as they go through training and to Vietnam. It portrays Marines as "killers" who glorify killing, except for a few in whom the training doesn't take hold; these are depicted as generally decent, smartass, sarcastic, skeptical, opponents of the war. That is the general division of Marines in this movie: 1-men who have been brainwashed to love killing on the one hand, and 2- decent men with a few faults on the other hand.
The drill instructor tells the men in boot camp that Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Witman are examples of the kind of Marines he wants them to become, because they knew how to shoot straight and to kill. There is an implication that the training in boot camp drives one trainee crazy enough to murder the DI and them himself.
There is plenty of stuff like this in the movie. The 1st type of Marine in the film goes overboard in acting boorish and stupid. It is overdone to the point that you notice how bad the acting is done. The idea is to create caricatures, making a distinction between the men Kubrick shows as having accepted the Marine training and those he shows as not having taken the training or the mission to heart.
The second type of Marine as depicted by Kubrick is often smartass to a great degree, almost to the point of openly ridiculing a general to his face. This Marine is given a hero status. The 1st type of Kubrick's Marines are depicted as dunderheaded morons, on whom the sarcastic wit of the smartass Marines is lost. There are no people in Kubrick's film who are representative of real life Marines: intelligent, good, decent men and women who fight when called upon to do so, but with no bloodlust or desire to kill anyone.
The Hollywood stereotypes are so stark in this film that it really is no surprise that it won so many awards.