An Anti-War movie

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2015)

This film, actually adapted from the novel The Short Timer, in 1987 by Stanley Kubrick, is split in two big parts. In the first one, new recruits arrive to Parris Island for a basic training. The first scene set the atmosphere of the film; young men's head are shaved, their eyes seem totally empty and one of them even looks retarded. The narrator is one of the recruits, the whole film is set especially around his war experience. The recruits are trained to become war machines. The simplistic one is bullied by the instructor and even if he is helped by the narrator he becomes totally crazy at the end of the first part. From this first step of the movie, we can see that's it's an anti- war movie, the recruits seem to have been brainwashed in order to be programmed to kill. The send part of the film is set in Vietnam. The narrator is now a reporter at the "Star & Stripes" journal and because he is one of the less exposed soldiers he asks to be send to Phu Bai, where most of the combats takes place. During this experience, he discovers the different types of soldiers, the ones who shoot on everything and the others, including the narrator, who seem to be self-minded.Yet, at the end everyone ends to kill someone. The war doesn't spar anyone. Even the army let their soldiers down, indeed they don't send tanks although soldiers are about to be killed. It shows how the war wasn't well organized, and we actually understand why it was rejected by parts of the US society. I found the first part of the film quite interesting. Yet it was also disturbing to watch the evolution of a nice boy into a soul- less killing machine.S.K. probably wanted to show the result of war on the soldiers who are still young boys who don't realize what happens to them. Indeed the movie ends on a image of the soldiers coming back to the camp and singing the mickey mouse song.