Kubrick's ode to war and man

Rating: 9/10 (9 March 2009)

War was the only subject really that Stanley Kubrick seemed to come back to over and over again. This film combines some of the satirical humor that made "Dr. Strangelove" such a classic with the brutally objective eye that he trained on war in "Paths of Glory." It's a story of the making of a killer, from boot-camp to the wrecked urban landscape of Vietnam. Matthew Modine plays the primary character, "Joker", and you'll also see Vincent D'Onofrio giving a wonderful performance as "Gomer Pile" and R. Lee Ermey perfectly cast as the hard-ass drill instructor.
But it's not really a movie about individual people, it's a movie about the loss of identity and individuality in the context of indoctrination and life-or-death struggles. As in Kubrick's "2001", the characters are only a mechanism for the themes of the film. It is a deliberately anti-melodramatic film that seeks to create its own formula. Like "Barry Lyndon", its period recreations are incredibly faithful. The idea is more to transport you as the viewer into the environment, and not to allow us the easy separation between self and experience that a strong protagonist would have afforded us.
The only real problem with the film is that there's no suitable ending, and what we do get by way of a conclusion is only a logical extension of the themes and doesn't really feel like it arises naturally from the material in any other way. I wish maybe something else could have been done to wrap it up, but I'm not sure what.
Where other war films give us either heroism or villainy, this film is quite obviously about the "duality of man", a phrase that even finds its way into the script. It views the phenomenon of war as just that, a natural product of the collective human imagination that follows its own rhythm and rules. And if there was no war, then what place would there be in the world for all these warriors we create? Sgt. Hartmann (Ermey) practically praises Lee Harvey Oswald for his sniping prowess, and another officer later ponders, "when we rotate back to the States, we're gonna miss not having anyone worth shooting."