Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam

Rating: Null/10 (20 March 2002)

Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is a different kind of war film. In it, we find neither brave soldiers whose acts of heroism we can easily identify with, nor clear-cut black-and-white messages about the war in easily digestible bits. Rather, it examines the roles our sanctified military institutions played in creating and molding recruits into soldiers, and, ultimately, criticizes that whole process as having churned out unthinking robots devoid of moral and ethical reasoning.
The first half of the film deals with the boot camp experiences of fresh young recruits. From the opening shots of the young recruits having their heads shaved to the subsequent day-to-day experiences of physical and mental challenges they endure, the whole process is about one thing: conformity. They are presided over by the hard-nosed, no-nonsense seargent, played brilliantly by R. Lee Ermey, whose sole purpose is to turn these recruits into "killers". Those who are physically or mentally not up to the challenge are reviled and punished, as is the case with one recruit named Pvt. Gomer Pyle, a fat, uncoordinated and naive kid. There is an ironic twist at the end of this first half that is shocking, but somehow not surprising given what came before.
The second half of the film is set in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, where we follow one of the recruits from the first half, Private Joker(played by Mathew Modine), now a soldier journalist, through the burned-out ruins of VIetnam. Unlike other Vietnam war movies where fights overwhelmingly are set in jungles, in this film, they occur mostly in rubble-strewn towns or cities, and are of short duration. I had problem with the second half of the film because there is no real sustained tension in any of the battle scenes: what battle scenes(more like skirmishes) there are seemed to have been afterthoughts in Stanley Kubrick's vision of Vietnam. Maybe, Kubrick was more interested in the message he was trying to convey in the film. I don't know, but I was disappointed. Moreover, the second half plays incongruously, juxtaposing scenes of violence or battle next to scenes of inconsequence, or worse, comedy.
However, the final scene of the film is a powerful one. I won't give it away, but it poses a dilemma that the soldiers are ill-equipped to deal with. Only Pvt. Joker is able to see through the smoke screen of war, and see the moral or ethical dilemma inherent in that situation. How Joker reacts in that scene is ultimately true of war in general. That is, there are no clear-cut right and wrong, only ambivalence and more questions. Something soldiers are not trained or conditioned to deal with.