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A fresh batch of recruits arrive for their 8 weeks of Marine Corps. training to prepare them for the Vietnam War. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman has the job of getting them ready for the greatest challenge of their lives.
Full Metal Jacket opens with the recruits having their heads shaved, marking the start of just 8 weeks of training, designed to turn them from boys, in to battle ready men capable of fighting for their country, and perhaps even surviving through the war. Sergeant Hartman, played by R. Lee Ermey, is intent of cursing, shouting, insulting and abusing them through it.
We mainly focus on two recruits, Pyle, played by Vincent D'Onofio, and Joker, played by Matthew Modine. Pyle is very stupid, very fat and not very athletic, and as such becomes Sergeant Hartman's project - to turn this jelly mountain into a solder ready for war. As with everything the Sergeant does, he goes about the task by shouting and abusing him through everything. Joker is one of the few recruits that exhibit a degree of intelligence, and contemplation, which is perhaps why he is given the job of helping Pyle, as he struggles to make it through the training.
The film is divided into two extremely different chapters. The first forty-five minutes covers the Marine Corps training, which is one of the greatest ever openings to a war movie. It is also probably the film with the greatest concentration of curse words and offensive vocabulary. However, it superbly combines harsh realism with humour.
In the second chapter of the film, the recruits that made it out of the training, head off to their assigned positions. We follow Joker, as he joins up with the journalism team, working on the Stars and Stripes magazine. Here he is mostly able to stay away from the front line, which for the most part he seems happy with. However, he struggles to deal with the political requirements of their role. They are not their to report the events, but rather to write what the American soldiers want and need to be reading.
Having just started to get to know and recognise several of the recruits during training, the film becomes rather difficult to follow for a while, as we, like Joker, have to adapt to new surrounding. This is not helped by the fact that this part of the film mostly evolves around following Joker around the field, meaning that we never really spend any length time with other characters, except perhaps his Stars and Stripes cameraman Rafterman, but he is barely noticeable for the most part. It is not until the later stages of the film, when Joker and Rafterman hook up with a platoon checking out an apparently abandoned former enemy post, that we finally get a little consistency, and a group of characters that we have time to become familiar with again.
This is a very intelligent film throughout. We see a fascinating picture of the mix of people thrown into combat together. Every scene plays on multiple different levels, as the relative intelligences and attitudes of the different characters plays out. The media angle allows Kubrick to further demonstrate these differences, with some excellent sound bites from various soldiers on their thoughts of the war.
While this is a superb film, sadly the second chapter, and in particular the early stages of it, just do not live up to the tremendously high standard set by the film's opening. They are far from being poor, but they just make the film a little too disjointed. However, for anyone that can take the barrage of offensive dialogue, and the continuous parade of drill songs, this is an excellent film. Kubrick really does add depth to a film like so few other directors can.
Mark: 8/10
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