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Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
8/04, 4/08, 2/25
4/08:
When I was in the seventh grade, everybody had to do a project for social studies fair, and it must be based on
history; for instance, one could build a small waterfall to illustrate the Niagara Falls.
Unfortunately, year after year without fail, a majority of the male seventh graders decided to fill a posterboard
with fake grass and soldiers and selected the name of some random battle without knowing what it was all about.
That's exactly how I view Full Metal Jacket for Stanley Kubrick.
When Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone saw success through their respective films
The Deer Hunter,
Apocalypse Now, and Platoon, an epiphany
struck through Stanley Kubrick's mind, and he declared to everybody that he would make a Vietnam War film only to
have completely missed the boat...many years later. This part is funny because it reminds me of the analogy about
10,000 runners who started and finished a race before some moron showed up at the starting line afterwards and no
one had bothered telling him that the race was already over.
As for Full Metal Jacket, I hate everything about it. I absolutely hate it with passion. It's clearly
targeted at IMDb fanboys who love to masturbate in their mommy and daddy's basement while being on the internet
all day long. I didn't like the movie in 1987, and I still don't today. In fact, I saw no redeeming qualities
back then. Every single character in the film is instantly unlikeable. Oh, you marvel over R. Lee Ermey's
performance? Well, guess what? Louis Gossett, Jr., was already there first in
An Officer and a Gentleman which won him an Oscar.
Let's be fair by getting one thing out of the way. R. Lee Ermey, an actual Marine vet who served in Vietnam, was
Louis Gossett, Jr.'s coach, and he trained him a great deal to prepare for the scenes as a drill instructor.
Anyway, watching Private Pyle be tortured doesn't pass for quality entertainment because he has to be
borderline mentally retarded. Where's the fun in that?
All in all, Full Metal Jacket is full of shit.
2/25:
Full Metal Jacket is pointless.
45 minutes of boot camp and then 75 minutes of fighting...what is it that Stanley Kubrick was trying to say?
This isn't a movie but military/war porn. Not only that, it's been done many times already. There's one scene when
Kubrick cheated the audience by having the squad go behind a building with the wall covered and, by the time
the men pull back, there's a hole on the wall, allowing the leader to be shot.
All in all, Stanley Kubrick began to lose it after Barry Lyndon.