In a World of S**T, they are not Afraid....

Rating: 9/10 (3 January 2006)

Kubrick's films are generally more accessible and mainstream than he is often given credit for. As gritty and unflinching as his take on the Vietnam War is, this is for my money his most mainstream work. Kubrick gives us a "grunts-eye-view" of military training and combat in a war that was particularly unpopular and well documented. This was the first war to be fully televised on TV, and Kubrick pokes fun at the soldier's awareness of this, and of the dubious nature of the propaganda put out by the military's own front-line reporting. Here we get a world-wind tour speckled with dark humor (but never too much politics, a similar stance that benefited the recent "Jarhead," which owes a world of debt to this film), excellent use of pop music (who thought Kubrick could go all Scorcese on us), and brutal sequences of hard-edged violence.
My one complaint is that Matthew Modine is extremely underwhelming in the lead role, but the rest of the ensemble is top notch. Lee Ermey is perfect as the sadistic but oddly sympathetic drill instructor who turns maggots into killing machines in boot camp, and Arliss Howard is especially good as the underwritten "Cowboy." Kubrick, always the master of his art, leaves us with some lasting images, most notably D'Onofrio's stare-down before blowing his brains out, which is mirrored later on by a young female Vietnamese sniper begging to be put out of her misery after being fatally wounded. Kubrick also closes the film with something he doesn't often do, a wink to the audience, as our grunts, now combat weary and barely alive, march to the theme of the "Mickey Mouse Club" showing that indoctrination started long before they were dehumanized in boot camp and rebuilt as "The Core." Semper Fi, indeed.