War. Ain't it hell?

Rating: 8/10 (17 December 2007)

I was thinking of naming my review as "Morality of man" or something else pseudo intellectual like that, but then again the movie itself has a perfect line to describe itself, right on the scene when a helicopter gunner is shooting running women in the rice field and Joker (Matthew Modine) asks if how can he kill women and children. Then man answers something in line "You just gotta aim lower. War, ain't it hell?".
Full Metal Jacket is clearly an antiwar statement. It doesn't portray war as noble, nor does it do that to the soldiers either. There's no sugarcoating in the portraying of what the soldiers do: they kill. War is something, that brings out the worst in each man, no matter how good you think you are, you will change for the rest of your life. After all, the soldiers really don't win, they loose no matter which side wins.
FMJ is clearly divided in two parts, in three if you count in the part, in which Joker goes to the field to do his war reporting. The first part shows how the boys are turned into killing machines, who feel no pity. This first part is the battle between Gunnery sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Eremy) and private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio), who is a bit slow man, who keeps ending in trouble because of that and his obesity. This boils down to the disciplinary action taken by the rest of the privates, who are fed up being punished of his doings. There is no mercy. But it will get more merciless, just in a bigger scale.
The second part is the Vietnam. Joker is assigned to war press and soon he is sent to do reports from the field. This is the turning point for him, as he finally realises what it all is about. Hardcore, as his team mates say, when he fires a bullet in the head of a wounded sniper. Killing someone up close is harder than doing that from a chopper, where you don't see they fearful eyes of the one you are going to kill.
Full Metal Jacket is basically two movies in one. Lesser director than Kubrick would have done only one half and ended there, but Kubrick shows what happens after the graduation. It's not just hardcore training done by sergeant Hartman, it's the end results of that training as well. But in the end, no matter how hardcore you are, no matter how you were trained, you will be scared when looking in the barrel. You are scared and you just want to get away.
Even though FMJ is one of the best war movies I've seen, there still is a couple of segments and couple of things I don't like about it. But those things are just personal things, nothing that will change the fact, that this is a good movie. For instance I didn't like the way Modine delivered his narrative lines, but in the end it doesn't take away a thing of the solidity of the movie. The other problem is, that I don't feel the Vietnam part is tight enough. When compared to the training part, Vietnam is full of air, but then again Kubrick was trying to portray how it wasn't all action, there was serenity as well, be it that came from between the thighs of a Vietnamese hooker.
For a summary Full Metal Jacket is a great war movie. It is the one people should really see.