For the full extent of my high school years (1988-92), I was a cadet in the United States Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. My fellow cadets and I worshiped the Boot Camp half of this film. R. Lee Ermey was like a god to us, and we memorized all of his speeches. But because we were so obsessed with the Ermey character, we never seemed to watch the second half. We apparently bought into the myth that it sucked.

Looking back now on that Boot Camp half that looms so large in my memory, I find two truths at work: First, it's been parodied so many times since then, frequently by Ermey himself, that it's initially hard to take…

This film has always given me a deep sense of unease. This feeling particularly applies to the first part, which takes place at basic training. In fact, I feel that what the recruits are exposed to affect myself directly. The whole film deals with partial degradation of human dignity and the self, but the way Kubrick throws this in our faces already from the beginning grabs me every time.
The haircut-sequence is an important part of this. As before a surgical procedure, the skulls are prepared for the psychological interventions that will follow. Human hair, an important part of who you are, is left behind in a heap on the floor. By completely changing and standardizing appearance this helps alienating…

While it is admittedly true that the second portion of the film itself is not as strong as the initial half, Full Metal Jacket still favorably makes for a relatively solid war feature that realistically depicts the horrors of the Vietnam War quite well, and is one that is for sure efficiently directed by one of the most influential & greatest filmmakers ever, Stanley Kubrick.

With the first section of the film, Kubrick opts for a more unconventional approach that shows us a platoon of U.S. Marines going through essential boot camp training. This is where Full Metal Jacket shines the most as it prominently displays exceptional performances from just about everyone involved in this specific portion, especially R. Lee Ermey…

There are only a handful of truly iconic war films and this most definitely belongs among them. It does not merely depict elements of war in a realistic way, it also intelligently critiques and satirizes our species' instinctive tendencies to wage war and the inescapable need for a communal spirit while cyclically purveying an 'us vs them' mentality.

In the first part, perhaps most famous for the foul mouthed genius of Lee Ermy, Kubrick shows us how the cogs are created in the machine that was the Vietnam war. By dehumanizing new recruits, Kubrick shows us the strengths and weaknesses of our race. When pushed, we can achieve anything we want. When thrust together we take care of our own…

Kubrick: Rewinding and Reevaluating ~ Part 2

"I wanted to see exotic Vietnam... the crown jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill!"

War is fucking hell. Has there ever been a better example of this on film? Not even the Best Picture winning Platoon, with its galvanizing look at Vietnam the year before, could've prepared audiences for the ice cold veins of Full Metal Jacket. Based on Gustav Hasford's semi-autobiographical novel, The Short Timers, Stanley Kubrick takes the form and function of that novel and creates a film that is episodic in nature,…

Before watching Full Metal Jacket I couldn't really depict Stanley Kubrick as an American modern filmmaker, mostly because movies of his, like The Shining or A Clockwork Orange, while pretty innovative and rule-breaking as they were at their time, nowadays they have that feel of a "twentieth century film". But Full Metal Jacket, specially in the second part (I believe it is perceivable how the film's structure feels like two different, but connected pieces), doesn't have that "former century" appearance, it feels almost like a twentieth first century work, or at least it could pose as one - which talks good about how avant-garde his filmography was. Pop culture extradiegetic music, those documentary-like scenes, and the overall topics, behaviours and…

Dark and comedic, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is about the Vietnam war and Joker’s experience from a cadet to seeing war in Vietnam. 

I’d only seen the very beginning with the drills, and never continued watching. War films in general are uncomfortable for me to watch, and this film is no exception. But after watching the whole thing, I can see that Kubrick shows not only the brutality of war, but even the contradictions of the Vietnam war itself.

The performances from the leads that stand out are Lee Ermey as the drill instructor and Vincent D’Onofrio as Private Leonard. The beginning with the repetition of drills and the eventual breakdown of Private Leonard are haunting and hypnotic. The slow camera…