Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket in 1987, adapting Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers with co-writers Michael Herr (whose own Vietnam memoir Dispatches had already reshaped how the war could be written about) and Kubrick himself. The film arrived two years after Oliver Stone's Platoon and the same year as John Irvin's Hamburger Hill, landing in the thick of a late-1980s cycle of American cinema trying to reckon, honestly or otherwise, with what the Vietnam War had done to the national psyche. Kubrick, working as ever out of England rather than Hollywood, shot the film almost entirely in and around the Beckton gasworks in East London and on the Isle of Dogs, locations dressed to stand in for the bombed-out city of Hue. The slightly eerie, industrial flatness of that stand-in geography is not incidental: it lends the film a quality that location footage in Southeast Asia might not have delivered, a kind of blasted, abstract quality that suits Kubrick's purposes rather well.
The production sits under the Warner Bros. banner alongside Kubrick's own Stanley Kubrick Productions and the smaller Natant outfit, with Kubrick retaining the degree of creative control he had long insisted upon as a condition of working at all. The screenplay credit is shared between Hasford, Herr and Kubrick, and the process of getting the script to screen was, by most accounts, as methodical and demanding as everything else the director touched. Kubrick had already proved, across films as varied as Paths of Glory and 2001: A Space Odyssey, that he was not a director who made the same film twice, even if certain obsessions (systems that destroy individuals, the thin membrane between order and chaos) returned again and again. Full Metal Jacket is, among other things, a film about institutional violence: the idea that the machinery designed to make men capable of killing has its own costs, paid in human terms.
Matthew Modine leads as Private Joker, a character defined by a certain cool, watchful detachment that Modine carries with an easy, slightly sardonic presence. Around him, Adam Baldwin and Dorian Harewood fill out the platoon with a grounded, physical credibility. But the film's early passages belong, by almost universal agreement, to two other performances: Vincent D'Onofrio as the hapless, tormented Private Pyle, a role that required D'Onofrio to gain around 30 kilograms for the part, and R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Ermey was a real Marine Corps drill instructor before he became an actor, and Kubrick, recognising something irreplaceable, essentially let him run loose. The performance has the texture of something only partly constructed, which is very probably because it was.
Cinematographer Douglas Milsome, stepping up after years working alongside the late, great John Alcott on earlier Kubrick productions, shoots the boot camp sequences in a flat, unflattering fluorescent pallor, all hard surfaces and institutional geometry. The Vietnam passages shift into a dustier, haze-tinged palette, rubble and orange firelight replacing the clean lines of Parris Island. Editor Martin Hunter keeps the boot camp section wound tight, rhythm and repetition doing a lot of the psychological work. The score is an unusual piece of work: Vivian Kubrick (credited as Abigail Mead) composed the original music, which sits alongside a selection of period pop and rock tracks, the juxtaposition of cheerful 1960s songs against images of military brutality being one of the film's more deliberate provocative gestures.
Full Metal Jacket is unmistakably a film of two halves, and the trouble is that the first is so extraordinary that nothing after it stands a chance.
That opening stretch, the Parris Island boot camp, is as good as anything Kubrick ever shot. R. Lee Ermey's drill instructor is movie royalty, harsh and frightening and horribly funny all at once, much of it reportedly ad-libbed, and the slow breaking-down of Private Pyle is gripping and almost impossible to look away from. It shows you the brutal reality of turning frightened young men into soldiers, and it builds to a climax that is close to perfect.
And then it just... changes. The second half ships out to Vietnam, and for me it never recovers the grip of what came before. It is not bad, exactly, but it feels considerably weaker, looser and more diffuse, and a lot of what it has to say about war has been done better elsewhere. Coming straight off the back of that shattering boot-camp finale, I found it deflating, an anti-climax the film never quite shakes off.
So I have to mark it accordingly. It is a very good film that falls short of greatness, and for an unusual reason: not because it is flawed throughout, but because its own first hour sets a bar the rest simply cannot clear.
Funnily enough, it is the second Kubrick war film I have finished feeling slightly short-changed by, after Paths of Glory. Three and a half stars, then, half a masterpiece bolted onto a merely good film, and I only wish the whole thing had lived up to where it began.
Full Metal Jacket remains a film that generates genuine argument, which is itself a mark of something worth watching. Whether its fracture, the clean break between its two halves, reads as a structural flaw or as a purposeful formal statement about discontinuity and disillusionment is probably the central question any viewer has to answer for themselves. It sits in a long tradition of war films that refuse straightforward heroism, a tradition Kubrick had been working in since, as I mentioned above, Paths of Glory, and for companion pieces on how cinema handles moral ambiguity under pressure, see also my thoughts on The Shining, another Kubrick film where confinement and institutional pressure warp the men inside them. It is, in the end, a film that contains an exceptional piece of filmmaking and a good deal of solid work around it, which is a strange and slightly frustrating thing to be. Half a masterpiece is still, of course, more than most directors ever manage.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1987 | Watched: 2026-09-29
Trailer
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