Full Metal Jacket. (15.)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1987.
A Clockwork Orange
Starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey, Dorian Harewood and Arliss Howard. Out on 4k Ultra HD Blu-ray from Warner Bros Home Entertainment. 112 mins.
Now that the dust has settled and three decades have passed, it is clear that the battle of the Vietnam war films was won by Apocalypse Now. As a Nam film, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket comes a distant second. Its consolation prize though is to be the most influential war film of its time, setting a template that almost every subsequent war film has worked from. Maybe I see movies through a Kubrick tinted filter but just as almost every costume drama cribs from Barry Lyndon, a lot of horror and sci-fi films take from The Shining and 2001, Kubrick's Nam-on-the-Thames has become a Full Metal Straightjacket that other filmmakers can't seem to see past.
Which is odd because the film itself is frustrating and infuriating, a technical and visual marvel, truly remarkable, but as a piece of drama, it is sullen and unresponsive.
Being too young to sneak into the X-rated Shining in 1980, this was the first Kubrick film I saw as new in a cinema when it opened. I was just back from holiday and all fired up for Kubrick to out Nam Apocalypse. The opening sequence where the cast all get their heads shaved, accompanied by country and western tune Hello Vietnam, was perfect. Then Ermey's drill instructor strides out of the screen at you with all his wild invective. It's a great first ten minutes. The Parris Island section with the recruits being psychologically and physically pulled apart and then put back together as Marine killing machines was remarkable. But after 45 minutes of it, I was itching for some action, impatient to get to Nam.
When Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made For Walking strikes up and we sweep into a Da Nang street I was up in my seat thinking, OK here we go. But then the film kind of ambles around, following Joker (Modine), now an army journalist, through various exchanges and excursions. It was all kind of interesting but disjointed and rambling. In the final half-hour the film gathers itself up for an extended battles sequence that is extraordinary and gripping but even the climax of that, where Joker executes a fatally wounded female enemy sniper to put her out of her misery, seemed bizarrely underwhelming. I left the cinema feeling that there seemed to be a big hole where the middle of the film should be.
According to some sources, there was indeed a whole middle section that got shot but then left out. There are also tales of the film originally being much more gruesome with the sniper getting decapitated and a game of football being played by soldiers with a (her) severed head. It's hard to say for sure how true any of these are: like real soldiers, Full Metal Jacket survivor's tales just get taller with the years.
There is definitely something dramatically flawed about the film. The opening section is bluntly effective, a funny and insightful one-man show by Ermey but after half an hour the point has been made and you resent it overstaying its welcome, suspect that the film is playing for time. But as soon as we are in the field, we miss its certainty. Back there we knew what the point was, what was being communicated and what the joke was. In 'Nam we are a little lost, probably because we're stuck tagging along with Joker.
With his peace button and Born To Kill helmet, he seems to be above the chaos around him. But he's more smart-arse than wit. His lines fall flat and he's constantly being upstaged by the performers around him. Joker is an audience surrogate, his purpose is to show that nobody is above this all, that none of us is as smart as we'd like to think we are: the ending sees him being dragged down to the level of the grunts, getting his hands dirty by killing a woman. But that's not how what happens: it's only what Joker tells us has happened in the movie's final scenes.
Thirty years on and I still can't understand that climax. In Gustav Hasford's book The Short Timers, the ending has Joker having to kill his best friend Cowboy (Howard.) He has been hit by the sniper and killing him is the only way to stop the rest of the platoon being taken out one by one as they go in to try and rescue him. Now That's a dramatic scene. Joker plucking up the nerves to administer a mercy killing rather undermines the film's whole thesis about the dehumanising effect of warfare. The Joker we spend time with in Nam seems entirely humanised and rational. He looks like he could be rotated back to the world without any great problem. At the end, he bottles it at the first sign of danger and it is intimated that this is his first kill. Having spent three-quarters of an hour showing us the dehumanising, brainwashing effects of boot camp, it's as if all that drill instructing went for nothing.
The film is billed as an outlandish black comedy with characters named Handjob, Eightball and Animal Mother, but the film's humour is perplexing. Kubrick created this abstraction of Vietnam at Beckton, the Isle of Dogs and the Norfolk marshes, so clearly nothing is meant to be taken straight. But the humour is buried in military jargon, or impossible to make out through the gunfire and explosions.
Take the scene where the Door Gunner is firing a machine gun out of a helicopter window, killing indiscriminately. Now there are some funny lines there, "Anyone who runs is a VC, anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined VC." but you can't hear a word of it over the helicopter and machine gun racket. Asked by Joker how he can kill women and children he replies, "Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much," and even if you could hear it I think the use of lead as a verb would take a few seconds to assimilate it and you'd miss the laugh. The only part of the sequence that is clearly heard is his last line, a gleefully ironic, "Ain't war hell!" I guess this is FMJ's equivalent of Robert Duvall's resigned reading of the line, "Someday this war's gonna end," in Apocalypse but here it just seems like cheap cynicism. You think, is that all you've got? Which is a reaction to a lot of the film, starting with the original posters which featured the Born To Kill helmet with the peace button attached and the tagline In Vietnam The Wind Doesn't Blow It Sucks.
The madness in Apocalypse was enticing, it lured you in and you loved it. The madness in Full Metal Jacket is enclosed and authentic. The humour isn't funny because it is in character, its the authentic expression of the military mindset. It's a film stuck inside its own little world
This film has been bugging me for over thirty years; it has a beloved place under my skin. For me, it ends Kubrick's five-film run of masterpieces from Strangelove to Shining but it is still a film I go back to again and again, and you can bet it was the highlight of the week when the blu-ray for this arrived at the door.
Eschewing the usual a trip out to the Philippines for filming is the film's perverse masterstroke. A war that was all about bush fighting, is presented to us as an almost entirely urban experience. The little Nam touches – the palm trees, the paintings on the walls, the hookers – are just there to stop this war film being too abstract. Really though Kubrick was remaking his first film Fear and Desire which was set during some unidentified, universal conflict. He wasn't getting in on the tail end of the Nam movie cycle, he was striking preemptively to take out all the future war films. The urban warfare terrain could represent almost any war before or since. (Any war, except Vietnam.) The reason cinema has failed to have any meaningful impact on subsequent conflicts in Iraq, Libya or Syria is that Full Metal Jacket had already taken control of most of the terrain.
Extras.
Commentary with Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey and critic and Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks.
Full Metal Jacket. Between Good And Evil. A half-hour Making Of doc from 2007 that is pretty good. I certainly learn things about the film I hadn't heard before.
Paths of Glory review
Eyes Wide Shut review
Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1987.
A Clockwork Orange
Starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey, Dorian Harewood and Arliss Howard. Out on 4k Ultra HD Blu-ray from Warner Bros Home Entertainment. 112 mins.
Now that the dust has settled and three decades have passed, it is clear that the battle of the Vietnam war films was won by Apocalypse Now. As a Nam film, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket comes a distant second. Its consolation prize though is to be the most influential war film of its time, setting a template that almost every subsequent war film has worked from. Maybe I see movies through a Kubrick tinted filter but just as almost every costume drama cribs from Barry Lyndon, a lot of horror and sci-fi films take from The Shining and 2001, Kubrick's Nam-on-the-Thames has become a Full Metal Straightjacket that other filmmakers can't seem to see past.
Which is odd because the film itself is frustrating and infuriating, a technical and visual marvel, truly remarkable, but as a piece of drama, it is sullen and unresponsive.
Being too young to sneak into the X-rated Shining in 1980, this was the first Kubrick film I saw as new in a cinema when it opened. I was just back from holiday and all fired up for Kubrick to out Nam Apocalypse. The opening sequence where the cast all get their heads shaved, accompanied by country and western tune Hello Vietnam, was perfect. Then Ermey's drill instructor strides out of the screen at you with all his wild invective. It's a great first ten minutes. The Parris Island section with the recruits being psychologically and physically pulled apart and then put back together as Marine killing machines was remarkable. But after 45 minutes of it, I was itching for some action, impatient to get to Nam.
When Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made For Walking strikes up and we sweep into a Da Nang street I was up in my seat thinking, OK here we go. But then the film kind of ambles around, following Joker (Modine), now an army journalist, through various exchanges and excursions. It was all kind of interesting but disjointed and rambling. In the final half-hour the film gathers itself up for an extended battles sequence that is extraordinary and gripping but even the climax of that, where Joker executes a fatally wounded female enemy sniper to put her out of her misery, seemed bizarrely underwhelming. I left the cinema feeling that there seemed to be a big hole where the middle of the film should be.
According to some sources, there was indeed a whole middle section that got shot but then left out. There are also tales of the film originally being much more gruesome with the sniper getting decapitated and a game of football being played by soldiers with a (her) severed head. It's hard to say for sure how true any of these are: like real soldiers, Full Metal Jacket survivor's tales just get taller with the years.
There is definitely something dramatically flawed about the film. The opening section is bluntly effective, a funny and insightful one-man show by Ermey but after half an hour the point has been made and you resent it overstaying its welcome, suspect that the film is playing for time. But as soon as we are in the field, we miss its certainty. Back there we knew what the point was, what was being communicated and what the joke was. In 'Nam we are a little lost, probably because we're stuck tagging along with Joker.
With his peace button and Born To Kill helmet, he seems to be above the chaos around him. But he's more smart-arse than wit. His lines fall flat and he's constantly being upstaged by the performers around him. Joker is an audience surrogate, his purpose is to show that nobody is above this all, that none of us is as smart as we'd like to think we are: the ending sees him being dragged down to the level of the grunts, getting his hands dirty by killing a woman. But that's not how what happens: it's only what Joker tells us has happened in the movie's final scenes.
Thirty years on and I still can't understand that climax. In Gustav Hasford's book The Short Timers, the ending has Joker having to kill his best friend Cowboy (Howard.) He has been hit by the sniper and killing him is the only way to stop the rest of the platoon being taken out one by one as they go in to try and rescue him. Now That's a dramatic scene. Joker plucking up the nerves to administer a mercy killing rather undermines the film's whole thesis about the dehumanising effect of warfare. The Joker we spend time with in Nam seems entirely humanised and rational. He looks like he could be rotated back to the world without any great problem. At the end, he bottles it at the first sign of danger and it is intimated that this is his first kill. Having spent three-quarters of an hour showing us the dehumanising, brainwashing effects of boot camp, it's as if all that drill instructing went for nothing.
The film is billed as an outlandish black comedy with characters named Handjob, Eightball and Animal Mother, but the film's humour is perplexing. Kubrick created this abstraction of Vietnam at Beckton, the Isle of Dogs and the Norfolk marshes, so clearly nothing is meant to be taken straight. But the humour is buried in military jargon, or impossible to make out through the gunfire and explosions.
Take the scene where the Door Gunner is firing a machine gun out of a helicopter window, killing indiscriminately. Now there are some funny lines there, "Anyone who runs is a VC, anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined VC." but you can't hear a word of it over the helicopter and machine gun racket. Asked by Joker how he can kill women and children he replies, "Easy, you just don't lead 'em so much," and even if you could hear it I think the use of lead as a verb would take a few seconds to assimilate it and you'd miss the laugh. The only part of the sequence that is clearly heard is his last line, a gleefully ironic, "Ain't war hell!" I guess this is FMJ's equivalent of Robert Duvall's resigned reading of the line, "Someday this war's gonna end," in Apocalypse but here it just seems like cheap cynicism. You think, is that all you've got? Which is a reaction to a lot of the film, starting with the original posters which featured the Born To Kill helmet with the peace button attached and the tagline In Vietnam The Wind Doesn't Blow It Sucks.
The madness in Apocalypse was enticing, it lured you in and you loved it. The madness in Full Metal Jacket is enclosed and authentic. The humour isn't funny because it is in character, its the authentic expression of the military mindset. It's a film stuck inside its own little world
This film has been bugging me for over thirty years; it has a beloved place under my skin. For me, it ends Kubrick's five-film run of masterpieces from Strangelove to Shining but it is still a film I go back to again and again, and you can bet it was the highlight of the week when the blu-ray for this arrived at the door.
Eschewing the usual a trip out to the Philippines for filming is the film's perverse masterstroke. A war that was all about bush fighting, is presented to us as an almost entirely urban experience. The little Nam touches – the palm trees, the paintings on the walls, the hookers – are just there to stop this war film being too abstract. Really though Kubrick was remaking his first film Fear and Desire which was set during some unidentified, universal conflict. He wasn't getting in on the tail end of the Nam movie cycle, he was striking preemptively to take out all the future war films. The urban warfare terrain could represent almost any war before or since. (Any war, except Vietnam.) The reason cinema has failed to have any meaningful impact on subsequent conflicts in Iraq, Libya or Syria is that Full Metal Jacket had already taken control of most of the terrain.
Extras.
Commentary with Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey and critic and Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks.
Full Metal Jacket. Between Good And Evil. A half-hour Making Of doc from 2007 that is pretty good. I certainly learn things about the film I hadn't heard before.
Paths of Glory review
Eyes Wide Shut review
