Kubrick Should Have Stopped While He Was Ahead

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2014)

Unfortunately, Metal Jacket shows the brilliant Kubrick in decline, and a long way from his anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory (1958). All in all, and despite some telling episodes, this 2-hours adds up to a rather pointless exercise in wartime experience. Certainly, the first half is undeniable in its powerful expose of Marine Basic Training and the dehumanizing effect. At the same time, contrasting its honest depiction of combat training with the heavily sanitized depictions from such 1950's counterparts as Take the High Ground (1953) or Battle Cry (1955) shows how much truth-telling in the movie industry movie had improved in 30-years. Still and all, the movie halves do not match up well.
I see the problem as lying with a script, and its inability to etch its characters strongly enough (excepting the ill-fated Ermey and Pyle) to bridge the gap and pull us into their battlefield predicament. At the same time, we only get a sporadic picture of the one continuing character, Private Joker (Modine). Perhaps, the best Vietnam part is listening to how the head of Stars and Stripes skews journalistic coverage in a propagandistic direction. So, it wasn't just folks at home being misled by their media, but troops in the field by theirs, as well. Anyway, the visuals are hellish in their fiery depiction of the battle for Hue. Then too, it comes as a real surprise that the sniper is a woman, the embodiment, I guess, of what the North meant by their motto "People's War". Looks to me, also, that Kubrick and co. had little idea of how to end the 2-hours. So we get a strident male chorus of a children's song, no less, as the platoon stumbles through a twilight world. Whatever else, that imagery does manage to symbolize the war in general.
All in all, however, the movie suffers in comparison to such other Vietnam flicks as Platoon (1986) or Apocalypse Now (1979). Too bad Kubrick wasn't 20-years younger when he made this two films in one.