Full Metal Jacket Review- By Michael Carlisle

Title: Full Metal Jacket

Year: 1987
Director: Stanley Kubrick

Country: US
Language: English

Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket would be a masterful short film, as the first half of the film is quite visionary. In the second half it seems like Kubrick does not know what he is trying to do with this film, it seems directionless and definitely lacks in emotion. It is set in Vietnam,  yet looks less stunning than many other Vietnam films such as Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now . It certainly lacks the intensity and character development both these better Vietnam war based films have.

The film opens to great promise. It starts out as a story of marines going through basic training, mainly about the rivalry of the cruel sergeant played by Lee Emery and the slow soldier nicknamed Gomer Pyle who is played by Vince D’Onofrio. This is the most interesting point of Full Metal Jacket which comprises of the best acting in this film. Emery is the most interesting drill instructor in the history of film, he is exciting, bold , humorous and obscene. In one scene Emery tells his soldiers to go to bed with their rifles and whisper poems of love to them.  Emery’s hard hearted nature eventually gets to Gomer Pyle, who is slowly going insane from the insults thrown at him and thus this results in great danger for both men.

War is Hell

The film ends, or this is where the film should end. There are great shots in the second half of the film, as Kubrick is a master with the camera , and set pieces but no point to any of the scenes after  the Pyle/Sargeant beginning.  The fight scenes look average, men crouching behind barriers breathing heavily, waiting for their turn to shoot, almost every war film ever made has a scene like this. Kubrick, you are supposed to be a film God, where is the innovation? You have close-ups and great angle shots but in the end they mean absolutely  nothing. At least in A Clockwork Orange you were using these shots to eventually build sympathy with the main character.

 After the Pyle segment, who is the main character? Perhaps Kubrick intended to make the second half about several individual characters and their how they’re becoming desensitized from this war but he spends so little time on these new individuals that we don’t really care about them. We can’t connect with them in the way we could with Gomer Pyle, when they are losing their sanity it really doesn’t matter to us. Want to see a good Vietnam film where you actually care about the multiple characters? Watch The Deer Hunter.  The first half of Deer Hunter actually contributes a great deal to the film, unlike Full Metal Jacket. This is why I feel Full Metal Jacket would work amazingly as a short film.  Whenever I’ve seen it on television I shut it off immediately after the first half, because to watch more would be a complete waste of time.

In Conclusion, while Kubrick has made a great deal of good films (2001, The Killing) he has also made some flops. Full Metal Jacket is a flop, it had a spectacular beginning  but a sub-par middle and end. It was made after all the great Vietnam films have been made and does not hold a candle to such classics as Platoon and Deer Hunter. The only reason this film isn’t forgotten is because it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, if it was made by a lesser known director it probably wouldn’t have made DVD.  Piss on it! 2/5