#38 - Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Have you read my review of Dr. Strangelove already? Because it's among my favorite films of all time now. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, also among my favorite cineasts, the film poked fun at the Red Scare and America´s obsession with communism. Here we have him criticizing the Vietnam war. And it's one hell of a film, ranging from over the top parody to a more serious breed of criticism.

The film can be divided in two parts. The first one introduces us to a platoon of U.S. marines during the Vietnam war, including our main character, nicknamed "Joker" (Matthew Modine), along with "Cowboy" and the chubby "Pyle" (Vincent D'Onofrio). The platoon is trained by Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), who taunts and intimidates the marines to harden them into soldiers. Pyle, overweight and clumsy, is constantly scorned for his incompetence and eventually earns the entire platoon a collective punishment from Hartman.

This first part is fucking fantastic. The themes of social pressure, camaraderie and manhood are perfectly executed, culminating in Pyle being in the edge of mental breakdown. I like the fact that Joker's role is downplayed to focus instead on Pyle and Hartman, because Vincent D'Onofrio's performance just keeps getting better and better as the character is tortured into insanity; and Hartman is just incredibly fun to watch. He´s the last person you would ever want to have as your boss, constantly teasing everyone over anything. You could say he is way too intimidating and ruthless to be believable and gives a more surreal or parodic tone to a film that is otherwise supposed to be serious, but even then he's by far the most memorable character of the film. Here's just a few quotes:

"Move it! Or I'm going to rip your balls off, so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world!"

"You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit!"

"How tall are you, private?" "Five foot nine? I didn't know they stacked shit that high!"

"Were you born a fat, slimy scumbag puke piece o' shit, Pyle, or did you have to work on it?"

      

And, my personal favorite, "You're so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece!"

In the second part we see Joker, now graduated, as a combat photographer for Stars and Stripes. He is sent along Private Rafterman to Phu Bai, where the Vietkong is attacking, and the rest of the film has Joker trying to survive the attack while interviewing the American soldiers on their views on the war.

It may not be as exciting as the first part in my opinion, but it still manages to be more insightful on the pointlessness of war; that is by far the best aspect of the second part. When Joker interviews the Privates you can see that they have either no idea of what they are fighting for, or they have their own twisted, chauvinistic motives. The private nicknamed "Animal Mother" is by far the most fucked up of them all, to the point of being completely insenstive about gunning down a teenage Vietnamese girl (to his defense she had just shot down a member of his squad, though).

      

Just look at that face. The guy is believably nuts and it really contributes to the tone of the film.

In the end, this is Kubrick pointing out how stupid war is and how clueless your average American can be about anything outside the borders of their country, and I love it for that. After seeing Dr. Strangelove I can assure you this man does political sattire better than anyone else in film history. Must watch if you're into that kind of films.