An outstanding and unique war movie

Rating: 9/10 (22 July 2013)

In 1987, 30 years after he'd firstly dealt with the subject of war in Paths of Glory, legendary American auteur Stanley Kubrick returned to the award-promising genre and released Full Metal Jacket. While it neither got the praise nor the awards it deserved when it came out, it has since then become a fan favorite and one of Kubrick's most beloved movies.
Full Metal Jacket is split in two cohesive parts: the first and shorter one setting place at a military boot camp in South Carolina and the second one depicting the actual war events in Vietnam. The audience's relationship to the characters is supposed to be very distant and Kubrick lets us know very little about them. The narrator, nicknamed Joker, is a spectacled young man that believes to see through the military indoctrination. He tries to resist the system and, as he says himself, is only here to be the first kid on his block to get a confirmed kill. This is, of course, highly unconventional for a war movie protagonist and Matthew Modine plays him in a realistic, yet not particularly likable manner. Vincent D'Onofrio portrays the burly and universally untalented Private "Gomer Pyle", who gets permanently insulted and degraded by the vulgar and loud Drill Sergeant Hartman, who is played extraordinarily well by R. Lee Ermey, who was a real-life Drill Sergeant some time before. His eloquent and absolutely R-rated speeches are hilarious and simply the best part of the movie. It's sad somewhat, that his character doesn't accompany the recruits in the Vietnam War that follows; at some parts, I really wished for awesome one-liners like " I bet you're the kind of guy that would f*** a person in the a** and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around!" But let's not be too harsh: the second part, if remarkably more serious, is again entertaining and because of the excellently crafted war scenes utterly gripping.
Typically for a Kubrick film, Full Metal Jacket has a lot of ongoing themes and motifs in it that you may not even recognize when watching it for the first time. He's dealing with sexuality and not only in the two scenes in which Vietnamese hookers appear. The recruits have an absurd relationship with their rifle - especially D'Onofrio's character - and in the film's second part the killing scenes seem to bring an orgasmic feeling to the soldiers. Furthermore, you can probably correctly interpret religious imagery as well as father-mother-child themes into the movie - the minute director Stanley Kubrick is likely to have intended all of them. But you don't even need to think about the film in such a 'sophisticated' way, Mr. K shows a great game with the war scenes already. There may not be as many as in genre classics Apocalypse Now or Platoon and, admittedly, they don't have the aesthetic greatness that the ones in the aforementioned Coppola flick had. However, what Full Metal Jacket has is an authenticity that is even more impressive if you are aware that the Vietnam scenes where in fact shot in a disused gas work in the vicinity of London. Kubrick made the most out of it and also did terrific work with the sound and the editing which is impeccable.
Because Kubrick wanted to make the recruits as one multi-persona character, there isn't as much to find out about the individual characters as some people may have wished for. Yet still, there is a very interesting and often only subliminal character study on the protagonist, Private Joker. Most of all, while Full Metal Jacket has the same view on war as the majority of other war films (even though the movie's protagonist is a war advocate, Kubrick himself is, of course, against war - I hope you noticed that), it shows us something new. A partly documentary and partly alarming new take that could have been boring. Thanks to Kubrick, it's not.
At least not at the first time watching it - the prolonged war scenes lose their thrill once you know what's going to happen.