"We've got to try and keep our heads until this peace craze blows over"

Rating: 6/10 (23 June 2007)

The major Vietnam anti-war films all took different approaches to the subject. Apocalypse Now cranked the war experience up into a surrealist nightmare. The Deer Hunter avoided dwelling on the conflict itself and instead focused on the psychological aftermath. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, made at a later time when the Vietnam was coming to be regarded as the previous generation's war, focuses on the transformation of men into soldiers.
Like most of Kubrick's films, Full Metal Jacket is divided starkly into informal parts 1 and 2. Opening with shots of the recruits having their head shaved (their individuality literally being stripped away), part 1 looks at the training process. Kubrick emphasises the gruelling nature of this process with drab, Spartan sets, straight, symmetrical shot composition and scenes which are relentless and repetitive. It's the stronger half of the film  part 2 just isn't as tight, and despite it's being more varied some segments are just boring.
Compared to other Vietnam pictures, Full Metal Jacket has a rather small-scale, cheap look to it. This was the price Kubrick paid for his artistic independence. Having said that, it's impressive that the whole thing was shot in England (aided by one use of footage) and it demonstrates how much an imaginative director and design department can do with limited means. Take, for example, an abandoned industrial estate (of which England has had plenty of since the 1980s), remove anything that gives the location away, graft in a few palm trees, slap on some genuine signs and murals  and you have an authentic looking Vietnam battleground.
Full Metal Jacket isn't bad, but there are lots of things I don't like about it. Most of them are down to the screenplay. The dialogue isn't as smart as it thinks it is, full of philosophical pretensions and trite moralism. Kubrick makes some poor decisions as a director too. The over-the-top stylisation of Pyle's mental breakdown  brilliantly staged as it is  doesn't sit well with the realist, occasionally documentary approach used in the majority of the film. Later, in the combat scenes, he uses some really clichéd slow motion shots when people get shot. Peckinpah popularised that, and he's also one of the few directors who could get away with it. Here it just looks amateurish.
This is yet another Kubrick film which all too often gets overrated because it is startling and different. It has its strengths (there is some great use of music, although even that is disappointing compared to Kubrick's sublime rhythmic direction on Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon) but overall it's one of my least favourite of his.