Born to Kill?

Rating: 9/10 (3 June 2006)

During the first part of this movie, set in a USMC training camp for the "phony tough and crazy brave", Gunnery Sergeant Hartman cites Lee Harvey Oswald as an exemplary US Marine marksman. The scene perfectly illustrates the total reversal of moral standards in modern warfare.
Stanley Kubrick has done anti-war before. "Paths of Glory" was hardly a recruiting poster for the French army and "Full Metal Jacket" doesn't do much for the US Marine corps either. Based on ex-marine Gustav Hasford's book "The Short-timers" (which I recommend as a gripping read), "FMJ" concentrates on how ordinary American men were moulded into killers then sent to fight in a war that they never understood.
Ignore the bad reviews for this film and ignore the good reviews as well. Watch it and make up your own mind. Love it or hate it, you'll definitely remember it for its depiction of human beings forced to take part in acts of pointless savagery. Many Vietnam war veterans still have to deal with the disparity between the conventional war that they were trained to fight, and the dirty guerrilla war that they actually fought in places like Hue City. No other film about Vietnam shows that disparity more clearly than "Full Metal Jacket".