An emotional film

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2015)

In 1967, during the Vietnam war, a marines' group composed of young men who have just enrolled, arrives in a training camp called Parris Island. So start several weeks of humiliation, of physical and mental punishments in order to harden and prepare them to fight. One of them, originally named Leonard Lawrence until the Instructor Hartman nicknames him Gomer Pyle because of his fatness, becomes the instructor's victim and then the whole group's. Thus this film makes us discover soldiers' life in training camps, the way American army forms and transforms men so that, on the battlefield, they behave just as machines which will not hesitate to shoot a man if they have to.
What stroke me the most when I watched this movie for the first time was the way the film director puts the spectators into training camps's atmosphere. A shot especially called my attention, at the beginning of the film ... But I have to fall silent for I must not spoil the plot for you.
In a word, a film which makes you feel a huge amount of different emotions, rough ones of course, but not only.