Posted: 02/12/2011

Full Metal Jacket Review

by Robert Baum

Review: Full Metal Jacket (1987)

It’s been seven long years since the release of The Shining. It must mean the time has now arrived…for another Stanley Kubrick film. The famed filmmaker’s twelfth work is a powerful study of Marines from Parris Island boot camp to the heat of battle in Vietnam.
Full Metal Jacket is perhaps the most haunting film about the Vietnam War since Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
Like Coppola’s refashioning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kubrick’s effort too boasts a screenplay with narration provided by Dispatches author Michael Herr. Beginning at Parris Island, a wisecracking recruit, given the moniker Joker (Matthew Modine), is the film’s narrator. He amuses the tough-as-nails drill instructor Hartman (R. Lee Ermy,himself a former d.i. and the film’s technical advisor). Hartman’s toughness tortures the grotesquely obese recruit Leonard Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) past the Rubicon.
In Vietnam, Private Joker writes for Stars and Stripes. He reunites with a boot camp buddy (Arliss Howard); and along with a few other leathernecks, they wind up facing the enemy in the city of Hue—which is actually somewhere in England, surprisingly. Kubrick, as his fans (and detractors) know has utilized UK locales for a number of years as he has a great disdain for travel and leaves photographing areas outside England to second unit crew. Some advance word on the film likened to Kubrick’s latest venture to his heralded 1964 work Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In fact the part of that celebrated effort where Sterling Hayden’s General Ripper keeps the forces under siege is borrowed for a sequence in Vietnam. Doing so seems to make the point that Kubrick regards war as a sick joke. Given that the latter half of the film occurs during the Tet Offensive of 1968 where a cease fire was declared only serves to augment the irony.
Many moments in the film serve as references to Kubrick’s prior efforts: the self-destruction of D’Onofrio mirrors that of Jack Nicholson in The Shining; Joker’s narration alludes not only to Apocalypse Now but to Malcolm McDowell’s voice-over in A Clockwork Orange (1971); and a a young Vietnamese prostitute is not too subtle an allusion to Sue Lyon in Lolita (1962); and much is borrowed from Kubrick’s antiwar masterpiece Paths of Glory (1956): the camera following the French troops through the trenches is utilized a few times in the boot camp barracks and when Joker and a colleague (Kevyn Major Howard) get a look at a mass grave in Vietnam.
A number of the characters in Kubrick’s work do not entirely differ from those in his prior films, save for maybe the malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), though Ermey essentially turns them into killing machines. It is an inevitability that artists’s works are reminiscent of their prior efforts that sometime border on the fringes of parody or plagiarism.
Still Kubrick’s new film, while riding the wave started by Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winner Platoon and Coppola’s recent Gardens of Stone, offers much to appreciate. The performances by Modine, D’Onofrio, and Ermey are excellent. The production design courtesy of Anton Furst creates the illusion of a city in the grip of war; it is amazing to think that it is actually London substituting for Vietnam. The period steetscapes particularly might make one think that there must have been some footage taken in some Asian country like the Philippines.
Comparisons to the works of Stone, Coppola, and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) will be inevitable, no doubt. Yet it is a better film than Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. One can only hope Kubrick’s next effort will be with us sooner than later. For while many admire Kubrick’s works (Paths of Glory is the favorite film of this author), his films seem more of an event. Not an event like the next Star Wars or Godfather, however; but an event nonetheless as they are works which Kubrick obsessively labors over every facet from pre-production to the release.

Robert Baum is Currently a Bryn Mawr, PA-based film afficanado and pop culture junkie.

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