War as the art of imposing order on chaos.

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2009)

As a preface: this will be an abstract review. As others have pointed out, this film is not especially plot-oriented, but moves from scene to scene as, plausibly, the transition from training to being stationed to boredom to combat and all the ephemera in between would actually play out for a soldier as subject.
Instead, this movie for me functions primarily as a thought experiment. You're young, say 18 years old. You enter the Marines. A thought process, a worldview is imposed onto you. You accept it because you see the harsh consequences that happen to those who resist. You try to maintain individuality throughout, though this is expressed mainly in admissible, largely futile symbolic gestures.
Training is over. You live a strangely divorced, comfortable life, stationed in an area where there is a civil war going on and unfortunates on both sides are dying every day. Now and then, you see inexplicable atrocities. When in the midst of them, you do not think of your side's role in creating geopolitical strategems or polemics, or who is right or wrong, or what your country is doing there in the first place, or... any number of possible questions. You understand that for survival's sake, you will function like those around you, serving your side. At this point, you are capable of anything, in the name of your own self-interest.
This, it seems to me, the movie believes is the nature of war. The cause may be damnable or noble, but the role of the soldier is the same. He is thrust into forces beyond his control and asked to do the unthinkable, for reasons beyond him.
(As a tangent, it's refreshing to me that this movie does not rehash the historical context, the protests, the question of administrative responsibility... but is also not a simply minded combat and conquest flick. Partially for this reason, it strikes me as being the most appreciative of the plight of the soldier while being against the ignobilities of war of any film I have seen to date.) Kubrick is a master, but on the other hand, I appreciate the fact that this isn't a director's movie. It is definitely not as imagistically heavy handed as 2001, Clockwork Orange or The Shining. The ideas in it can be savored by most anyone coming at it from pretty much any viewpoint.