Full Metal Jacket
I love the opening of “Full Metal Jacket.” Backed by a folk tune lamenting the trip to Vietnam, we’re led through short clips of recruits having their heads sheared for basic training. We get a glimpse at the faces of these recruits and see fear, laughter, annoyance, anger and apathy, all in the course of half a minute. It’s a bouncy, fun opener, and one that sets in motion the juxtapositions of tone that last throughout the film, because it abruptly cuts to the same recruits being beaten down by their drill sergeant only a minute later. “Full Metal Jacket,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, is a movie in two main acts. In the first, we follow two recruits, Joker and Pyle, through basic training; in the second, we see Joker enter the field as war correspondent during the Tet Offensive.
Like most art that deals with Vietnam, “Full Metal Jacket” is told through surrealist methods: Apart from sparse flashes of lucidity, the movie plays out as though the characters are moving through a dream. There are times when the acting is ridiculous, sounding as if the actors are reading their lines from a teleprompter, and it’s puzzling that Kubrick didn’t get his actors to do another take on these scenes. With his reputation as an exacting and meticulous director, maybe he intended it. In any case, the stilted acting furthers the sludgy, dreamlike feel of the film, and is remarkably unnerving. In contrast to this, R. Lee Ermey’s portrayal of Hartman, the first act’s drill sergeant, is electrifying. Ermey is a former drill sergeant, and this comes through with his biting insults (most of which were ad-libbed) and abusive tactics while training his character’s recruits.
The movie is complimented by its strong soundtrack, drawing from the pop hits of the time period. It’s lacking the standard “Fortunate Sun,” but it works nonetheless. In one of the more ridiculous scenes later in the movie, Joker and his cameraman connect with a platoon of Marines, of one which poses for a picture with a dead Vietcong he had been keeping. The whole scene plays out to the psychedelic, looping tune of “Wooly Bully.” It’s scenes like these that demonstrate the main thrust of the film: the effect Vietnam had on naïve and reckless boys thrust into the jungle. The characters speak in the lingo of high schoolers, constantly trying to say something that might out-shock the last.
"Full Metal Jacket" came out in 1987, 12 years after the Fall of Saigon. This is one of the movie’s main failings—by that time, there wasn’t much that hadn’t been explored about the Vietnam war. Some of the “set piece” scenes in the movie fall flat as they’re reworked versions of tropes we have already seen. That being said, Kubrick finds ways to explore these themes in a way that keeps them interesting—if only visually so. The film often feels like a highlight reel of beautiful scenes, more like a book of short stories than a novel. This isn’t exactly the worst criticism that can be levied at a movie, though.
The movie ends on the image of Joker and his patrolling burning city of Huế. They’re singing the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse song, strolling through what looks like hell. Maybe Full Metal Jacket covers pre-trodden ground, but you can’t deny it does so in style.