Full Metal Jacket

Kubrick isn’t a director who needed glossy perfection in his films’ aesthetics. He could make an epic like Spartacus and then four years later, still be content with a black-and-white film mostly constructed from long, static shots of Peter Sellers’ face. 2001 and A Clockwork Orange are full of staggeringly powerful visuals, but they make the best of small budgets and despite being far ahead of their time, don’t have the slick Hollywood look of his two 80s movies, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. Everything about this film looks perfect. The war scenes may have been filmed using old crumbling factory buildings found around England, but when you see those pillars of flame pluming out from the torn-up edifices still plastered with old Vietnamese posters, and you see those tanks firing at distant warzones, I seriously doubt you will doubt the film’s setting for a moment.
But while the film looks slick, sharp, professional and always extremely real, Kubrick was an eccentric, an iconoclast and a visionary, and this film stands alongside his others, perhaps looking a little more polished, a little less dated, but with the same distinctive flavour, the same strength of image and subtlety of touch. And while it looks every bit as good as a any other big-budget blockbuster, it certainly does not make concessions to the familiar platitudes of Hollywood storytelling.

The film is divided into two distinct sections, following a soldier in the Vietnam war first through his brutal training and then during his active service. No exposition here, no easy introductory passage to let us know how good-hearted our main character is, how sorry he was to leave his home, or even any indication, at the beginning, of who our main character is going to be. We see men having their heads shaved before they enter military training, and then the anonymous ranks are yelled at and abused by their drill instructor Sgt Hartman, a bravura performance from real ex-drill instructor R. Lee Ermey that puts even Sgt Foley from An Officer and a Gentleman to shame, being able to go much further, even if the latter came out with the famous ‘steers and queers’ line first. The least able of the new recruits is mercilessly victimised by Hartman and resented by the other privates, until even the sympathetic squad leader Joker begins to fear he’s losing his mind. The bizarre mixture of camaraderie and dehumanisation gives rise to some of the most strikingly surreal images of the film, indeed, of any film, like the image of one man standing alone in his underclothes eating a doughnut while two dozen men do press-ups around him. The climax to this section is abrupt and haunting, but perhaps a little overdone.

The second section echoes the first. Joker is now a military journalist, his clever one-liners getting him close allies but also annoy his superiors, meaning he’s soon sent to the front, just as he was made squad captain in training. The film shows us vignettes of the war, some dark, like the helicopter gunman who takes great pride in killing defenceless citizens, some just as surreal and humorous as any in the first part, like when the journalists go to see a pit of dead bodies, and the soldier they interview in front of the dead keeps pausing to crack cheesy grins for the camera, a contrast all the more memorable for its believability. He meets an old friend and ends up trying to cross the warzone with him, until they run into trouble with a well-concealed sniper. The deeply human realisation of war, the idea that men can be joking and laughing while someone dies, that in the presence of someone who has just been blown up by a landmine, you can be awkward and not uneasy and not quite know what to say, makes a refreshing change from the seeming dichotomy of serious epic war films full of grand gestures and seriousness and the comic war films where everything is absurd and exaggerated.

In every way, a remarkable piece of work. A visual spectacle, a great soundtrack of period music, some moments that are immortal in motion picture history and a few extremely well-sketched characters, it’s another film that doesn’t rely on a clever plot or any kind of overall goal, but focuses on a setting and explores it with an intimacy that defies any doubt on its factual basis. This is what it looks like when a visionary looks at an everyday reality that is understood entirely by those who are participating but makes very little sense to observers, that is, war, and makes a film of it.