Good Technique, No Art

Rating: Null/10 (29 November 2004)

Full Metal Jacket is an artless film that holds a mirror to military training and Vietnam, broadcasting the images back at the public as if to say "See? Your country sucks." (Kubrick was living in England.)
Well, uh, the war was already way over when the film came out, and uh, we ended it because we already knew it sucked, and what took you so long to figure that out Stanley, maybe it's because you were in England. By the way Platoon is a better vision of being in-country in wartime and Apocalypse Now is a great piece of film art as well as a much richer depiction of the Vietnam gestalt.
The worst thing about this bad movie is how it brutalizes you for watching it. The boot camp sequence makes you want to kill yourself, too, just to make it end. So does the second half of the movie.
Kubrick has this problem with wanting his cake and wanting to eat it too. He hates the whole war/military aspect of American life, so he makes a visciously accurate depiction of it, perfect in every brutal detail. Is that admiration or contempt? He's schizo that way, wanting it both/ either. That's not a clear vision or commentary - that's confusion. The audience has to suffer, and for what? We already knew it was bad, no thanks Stanley.