born again hard

Rating: 8/10 (21 November 2010)

(Note: the following was written when the film was first released in 1987...) Can anything new be added to the current cycle of Vietnam War films? Stanley Kubrick seems to think so, and he goes about his business after a seven-year absence as if his were the first film to be made on the subject (which it might have been, back when he began it). What's surprising is how well such a fussy and deliberate filmmaker like Kubrick captures the madness of war (much as he did in his earlier Paths of Glory). But the best part of this lopsided scenario (co-written with Michael Herr and author Gustav Hasford) has nothing to do with the conflict in Vietnam, focusing exclusively on the rigors of Marine Corps training and indoctrination (i.e. brainwashing). These early scenes are classic Kubrick, and would have made a near perfect short film if released independently. The subsequent battle scenes (famously, if not always convincingly, recreating Southeast Asia in rural England) are, by comparison, only anticlimactic padding, showing what happens when the hot-blooded fury of combat gives way to the cold-blooded reality of death, represented here by a single, harrowing incident where a squad of soldiers is pinned down by an invisible sniper during the urban fighting of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Never mind that Francis Coppola covered similar ground in one brief scene of 'Apocalypse Now'; for Kubrick, it's a welcome return to form, up to a point: a compact, mini-masterpiece awkwardly matched to a rambling, episodic war story.
(postscript: twenty-plus years and countless viewings later 'Full Metal Jacket', like any genuine classic, makes a lot more sense...not as an unbalanced film-in-two-mismatched-parts, but as a construct following the elliptical arc of a boomerang. I've said it many times but it needs repeating: if you've seen a Stanley Kubrick film only once, you haven't really seen it at all...)