Any film that makes you want to hit the TV must be good

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2002)

That's right. If something happens in a film and you find it so outrageous that you want to get up off the coach, reach through the screen and hit someone has done its job (unless it's a Pauly Shore movie, in which case you want to hit the producer).
Seriously, "Full Metal Jacket" is probably Stanley Kubrick's best film. It's based on a novel called "The Short Timers" and is told in three parts, although most people think of it as two halves. The title refers to the hard metal casing surrounding the soft lead core of the bullets used in the M-16's and M-14's the Marines used in Vietnam. It's also an allegory, described the hard shells that are molded around soft, impressionable young men when they become killers as impersonal as a bullet during war.
The first part of the film is easily the best. Young recruits arrive at bootcamp, get their heads shaved and meet the drill sergeant (played to perfection by R. Lee Ermey, a then-recently retired real life Marine drill instructor). He curses at them and screams at them, assigning them goofball names that describe their personalities while dehumanizing them. The chief recruits here are Private Joker (Matthew Modine), who is here mostly because he doesn't want to join the Army; Private Cowboy (Arliss Howard, who's here because he wants to be), and Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio, who doesn't have a clue about life off the farm and is in for a rude awakening). Watching these "numb nuts" get turned into emotionless killing machines is quite disturbing at times. Even outrageous, although it is based on real Marine Corps training doctrine. Take, for instance, the marksmanship scene where R. Lee Ermey highlights Charles Whitman, who shot several people from the tower at the University of Texas, and Lee Harvey Oswald, who allegedly shot a mobile JFK from the sixth floor of a book depository. He then asks where both men got their marksmanship training -- the Marine Corps, as if he really wanted to glorify these guys just because they were Marines. Watching that, I wanted to reach through the TV and joke Ermey.
Part two follows Joker to Vietnam. Many people think the movie went downhill from here, but it is an essential part of the movie. Joker and his fellow Marines were trained to be killers, but they were trained to fight an old war. America was used to wars like Korea and World War II where you had a clearly defined enemy and clearly defined battlefields. Instead, we get men sitting around doing nothing, waiting to go into battle the next day like going to the office. Vietnamese women sell themselves openly while young Vietnamese men wait to either steal cameras or shoot GIs. Joker talks like he's ready for combat, but when the Tet Offensive opens in 1968 and he has to man a machine gun to protect his base, he finds out he's not ready. It's eerie to watch the Marines when they have to retake Hue City. They actually look happy as they mass up and walk behind tanks because the war is finally looking like what they had been trained for -- a straight up fight between two armies. The most interesting part of this section of the film is where a TV crew interviews Marines. Some of the comments are ordinary, some are profound and some are just plain boastful, if not moronic (if you watch some of the reality-based TV shows today, you'll understand).
The third and final section of the film depicts the biggest battle of Vietnam -- how it really changed the men fighting it. Joker hooks back up with Cowboy as he is leading his squad to an old part of Hue City where military intelligence thinks some enemy soldiers are holed up. The squad is ambushed and several members are killed. The squad shoots up an entire building in response, but don't hit the sniper. The harrowing scene has Dorian Harewood lying wounded in the open as the sniper shoots holes in him trying to lure his buddies out of hiding (John Wayne's "Sands of Iwo Jima" hinted at this scenario and "Saving Private Ryan" copied it). It's almost repulsive to see American soldiers cowering when one of their own is in need of help, but this is the reality of war. Later, when the surviving squad members finally get up the courage to hunt down the sniper, we get to see the true effect of war. Joker is trying to maintain his sense of morality while the other squad members are eager for revenge. Kubrick was trying to show the real tragedy of Vietnam in that most of the soldiers were not like Joker. They were hardened and haunted by war, but when it was all over, you knew they would be sent straight back into society (Think of Sylvester Stallone's Rambo in "First Blood" who wanders around homeless and aimless because Col. Trautman trained him for war, but not for peace).
The camera work of the film is great, especially the choppy style that gives us a bird's-eye view as soldiers run for cover. Kubrick never tries to overwhelm us, just show us the truth. The movie has been hailed by many critics as the best war movie ever made and I agree, although "Das Boot" and "Saving Private Ryan" are close. It is not an anti-war movie, per se, because it just shows what really went on in training and during the war. It doesn't take sides, like, say, John Wayne's unabashedly patriotic "The Green Berets" (which, by the way, inadvertently, showed the futility of combat in Vietnam during the camp attack scene).
Overall, I rate this 9/10. Too bad Kubrick died with "Eyes Wide Shut" as his last film. Hopefully, people will remember "Full Metal Jacket" instead.