Stanley Kubrick – Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Another masterpiece of Kubrick’s. I have seen three cult movies of Kubrick’s before Full Metal Jacket. They were Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. I admired all of them. Barry Lyndon for its photographical beauty (shot in Ireland btw); Eyes Wide Shut for its mysterious story and unforgettable images shot with care and effort; and A Clockwork Orange for its courageous view to human nature and being an opening to similar stories in the film industry and in the media.

 

Full Metal Jacket is a war movie with questions of Kubrick in the mind to the meaning and purpose of war. In this tragicomic story, one finds himself asking the question "why the hell are we fighting for?" In the following of the movie, you see how the soldiers are dehumanized and empty-brained. The movie can be thought as two parts, in the first part a group of new recruits, right before being sent to the Vietnam War, are (so-called) disciplined in a training camp and taught how to obey to their superior ("-Sir, yes sir!") by a psychologically-sick instructor and also how to talk with their rifles.

Then, in the second part of the movie, the troops are sent to the field and we watch several scenes of these miserable soldiers during the war and the effects of the war on their psychology. In between these two parts, there is a connection scene (that I liked for its song choice and funny dialogs :)) with a Vietnamese prostitute who comes next to two soldiers who just arrived to Vietnam and sitting outside of a café, asking with a broken English "-You have girlfriend Vietnam, -You like party? -me so horny"... :) I couldn’t stop myself watching this scene several times with my boyfriend because of its funny script but also it was a nice transition from the training camp to the war field and showing how unexpected things will happen to those having-no-idea-what-the-war-is soldiers and how miserable they are. worth to watch movie!

editor’s note: Stanley Kubrick is famous by his perfectionist style of shooting each scene in a pure care until he gets what he photographically wants. As far as I know, in Eyes Wide Shut, he shot a scene 127 times until he sees what he wants.

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