Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" was on my mind recently, so I dug it out of my DVD collection and popped it into my Pioneer DVD player. I got that big Stanley Kubrick DVD box set with the remastered editions of each film. This is opposed to the edition that came out immediately after his death. That set had the shittiest prints of the movies available. Did you see all the grain on "The Shining?"

"Full Metal Jacket" was really the last great film from Kubrick before his death (with all due respect to "Eyes Wide Shut"). At the same time, it is a movie that has perplexed me as well. It always seemed to be two movies in one. The first half being the most definite version of basic training ever put on film. The second half shows the marines in battle where they come into contact with the have been trained to fight and kill. I haven't really been able to put the two parts together regardless of how much I like the movie. So with this review, I'm gonna try to put it all together if I can.

The first half of the movie where we see the recruits getting stripped down to the bare minimum and built back up into killing machines is the best part. The opening shot with all the recruits getting their heads shaved completely is a brilliant image as it illustrates the first step in seeing these men completely stripped of their individuality.

Then we meet the drill seargeant who is one of the most intense characters as well as one of the most loathesome ever put on screen. It's astonishing to hear that R. Lee Ermey was not originally cast in this role. Some other actor was cast, and Ermey was originally hired as a military consultant as he was once in the Marine Corp and even served a couple tour of dutys in Vietnam. This guy had done his research to the point where he met with Stanley and said he should play the part. When Stanley said that the part had already been cast, Ermey got in his face and told him to stand straight when he addressed him. The way Ermey saw it, the actors needed to be whipped into shape, and he was the one to do it. After seeing the movie, you can see why.

It's both frightening and horrifying as to the lengths Ermey's character will go to in order to build his scum dwellers into killers. Gets right in their face and screams their heads off and gives the men names that are not flattering and will stay with them for as long as they are Marines and as long as they are alive.

This movie launched some long running careers. Ermey may never have had as great a role as he did in this movie, but he has continued to work as a character actor nonstop after all these years. Then you have Matthew Modine who is one of those actos who has been in every other movie since this one came out. He is great as Joker, a Marine who manages to hang onto a piece of himself throughout basic training, only to lose most of it in combat. Of course, the most memorable performance in this movie is that of Vincent D'onofrio who plays Gomer Pyle, a recruit who somehow stays in basic training regardless of how lousy he is in it. I guess the drill seargeant thought that if he gave up on Gomer, it would speak poorly of his own skills.

D'onofrio has to be exposed to the most humiliating of moments in this film as he is constantly berated by Ermey's drill seargeant; being made to walk like a baby with his thumb in his mouth and with his pants down, getting slapped hard in the face, and made to eat a donut he stole from the mess hall while the rest of the recruits are punished for his transgression. It was the first of many times we would see just how far D'onofrio will go to play a part. There's no other reason why he would have passed out all those times on the set of "Law & Order - Criminal Intent." Furthermore, he gained 70 pounds to play this role, and that's more than Robert DeNiro gained to play Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull!"

I look back at this movie and think that maybe it would have been better if the whole movie had just focused on the basic training which was horrendous. I have no doubt that it is accurate. I worked with people at Disneyland who have gone through the training depicted in this movie, and they said that they cannot bear to watch the movie as a result. They said that the thing they were often was to end any sort of argument by breaking the other person's arm. No wonder they want to get away from all that. The more you sink into that training, the less of a human being you become.

This not to mention the Kubrick glare that is on full display on this film. D'onofrio does it the best as his character grows more and more insane as he gets abuses hurled on him by Ermey and the rest of the recruits. By the end of his role in the movie, he outdoes Jack Nicholson's Kubrickian glare that he perfected in "The Shining." Matthew Modine achieves this glare at the end of the movie when he finally sees up close what he is shooting at.

In fact, looking at that, I think that's what the movie is about. Matthew Modine's character of Joker is in training throughout the entire movie. It doesn't just stop when he leaves Paris Island for Vietnam. Joker and all the guys there who survive basic training have only begun to becoming soldiers in a true sense. They have been trained to kill, but now the time has come to face the enemy up close and put that training to the test. I am not sure that even through all that training that you can ever be fully prepared to take a human life. There's got to be more to that.

Matthew Modine's character sees death up close just as basic training comes to an end. But he, as well as everybody else, has been trained to see the enemy as an object more than as an individual. When we see the marines kill the vietnamese, is from a distance for most of the film. We never really get to see to many of them up close. When we do, it is when a vietnamese prostitute is brought in for the troops pleasure. They see her more as a fuck machine more than anything else. They keep referring to the enemy as "gooks" and see them as a whole. I guess that is what the military would prefer to see them as.

So the true irony of all this is that when they take down a sniper, they are forced to see her up close and suffering. They no longer see an enemy. They see someone who is just as afraid of them, and they recognize that fear in themselves. This is where Joker completes his mission when he shoots her dead. All you see is his face as he raises the gun. After he pulls the trigger, you know that he has completed his training as a soldier and become a different person. He will never ever be the same again no matter how hard he tries to convince himself.

This all reminds me of another great Stanley Kubrick movie he did with Kirk Douglas called "Paths Of Glory." That was a movie about when the army tries some of their own soldiers for cowardice on the battlefield. One of the key moments in the movie is at the end where a german woman is brought to the stage in a bar with all the american troops sitting there, laughing and heckling her. Then she starts to sing a beautiful song that quiets the men down and even has them crying. They see the enemy up close, and they are presented with a choice of whether or not to deny her of her humanity. But by pulling the trigger, Joker essentially is pointing the gun at himself, because he is a casualty of war in a whole other way.

So for once, I think I have made total sense of the movie, and how both parts fit together. It no longer feels like two movies in one. It still is in a sense, but now I see the connection.

Stanley Kubrick's touch and style are very evident here with the atmosphere being very cold and unforgiving. He left his own mark on this movie as all great directors do. I have already talked about the acting, but aside from the particulars, there is not a single weak performance in this movie. I also like Stanley's choice of music in this movie. The songs fit each scene perfectly. I also loved Abigail Mead's sparse and heavily atmospheric score that covers the images and the mood of the film completely. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking, even if it does appear flawed to many.

Is this the best war film ever made? Many critics seemed to think so when the movie was released. I'm not so sure. There are actually a number of war movies that I have still not seen like "The Big Red One" and "Platoon" among others. All the same, I have to say that I would "Apocalypse Now" (either version, original or redux) ahead of "Full Metal Jacket" just because that was even more breathtaking and risky than what Kubrick came up with. "Full Metal Jacket" was released sometime after "Platoon," so it may have suffered some in comparison.

My other big memory involving this movie was seeing Siskel & Ebert review on their show all those years ago. The late Gene Siskel battled Roger Ebert throughout the entire show for giving "Full Metal Jacket" a thumbs down. Gene said he never felt a bullet in a movie quite like this. Roger felt, as many others did, that the movie was disjointed and unfocused as it went straight from basic training into Vietnam. Seeing them fight over the movie was kind of funny, but then Roger got all pissed at Gene when Gene couldn't understand why Roger gave thumbs up to "Benji The Hunted" and not to "Full Metal Jacket." That was a ridiculous argument in that the two movies are completely different from one another.

I have been an Ebert fan since I was a kid, even when I angrily disagreed with him on movies like "The Man With One Red Shoe" (I have since come to my senses on that one). I also enjoy reading his reviews and can see why he got the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism. But he was wrong about this movie. It does all connect together even if it is not totally apparent upon your first viewing.

I miss Stanley. He led a great life and left with a volume of great movies that will be with us for all time. Still, his death felt so unfair. It felt like he left us far too soon. There were still some movies that only he could have made (excluding "A.I."), and now we will never get to see them. I guess that's what so depressing about his passing. We spent years and years and years after "Full Metal Jacket" to see what he would do next. It looked like "Eyes Wide Shut" was a warmup to what he was planning to do next.

But when all is said and done, there are still a number of Kubrick movies that I haven't seen all the way through, so the Kubrick party is definetly not over for me. Then again, I have no idea of when I will ever get around to watching "Barry Lyndon."

Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/249331/full_metal_jacket.html