illustrates the sheer lunacy of war

Rating: 9/10 (16 April 2000)

There have been many films which argue that war is hell, but only a handful which argue that war is sheer lunacy. This short list includes Apocolypse Now, Three Kings and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, one of the best movies of the 1980s. In the first half of the film, Matthew Modine's character can only look on helplessly as one of his fellow recruits, an overweight misfit, is slowly driven crazy by military life. The second half is made up of a series of short vingettes showing the dehumanizing effects of war but also the bizarre reasoning people use to justfy it. In one scene, a military journalist orders his men to use a more mundane phrase instead of "search and destroy"...without getting into a debate over whether the Gulf War was justified, it certainly shows that some things never change.