Well made, with punch, but very straight forward for Kubrick

Rating: 7/10 (6 July 2010)

Full Metal Jacket (1987)
An extremely straight forward, funny, and tragic Vietnam War movie, going from the excessive rigors of boot camp to the hard core horrors of hand to hand combat.
Stanley Kubrick shows the bare bones of it, without romanticizing, and without making heroes out of anyone. There are two main emotional turning points, one at the end of boot camp, and one near the end of the movie, and both are about the madness of war and about death. And both are pulled out of the mainstream thread of the story with a jolt. It's sensationalism, really, but made with Kubrick rigor.
A balance to all the horror is the humor, not as insane as, say Dr. Strangelove, but with a similar dry wit. The first forty minutes of the film are justly famous for their almost campy but still believable scenes of the sergeant training young Marines. (And this sarge is a real Vietnam vet who did this kind of training.)
Compare this movie to Platoon and you'll see a much more restrained movie, and without the jungle warfare we usually associate with Vietnam. Platoon makes people out to be larger than life, and Kubrick intends more to say, hey, this is the real deal, whatever cinematic tricks are showing.
But compare this to Apocalypse Now or Deer Hunter and you might start to wish Kubrick hadn't played it so straight. Full Metal Jacket lacks, above all, imagination, and as a movie, it needs it.