Review of Full Metal Jacket (1987) by Erick K — 10 Nov 2015

Aside from having a terrific memory of catching this in the theaters on opening night (Snuck out of the house to meet my friends, got hammered like shit and then caught this at a midnight show), this is probably the best Vietnam movie that's not really a Vietnam movie.

It had the misfortune of being released during the mid-80's/early-90's Vietnam movie wave so it got lumped in with middling-to-shitty movies like "Hamburger Hill" and "Casualties of War.

" Watching it separate from that period, it's Stanley Kubrick at the top of his game and a perfect bookend for his "Paths of Glory." The Parris Island sequence is so strong that absolutely nothing that comes after it, even the relative novelty of urban warfare in Hue City, can hope to top it, but the second half is more impressive on a purely technical level (tons of single-take sequences, somehow turning the Eastend of London into a pretty fair facsimile of Phu Bai and surrounding areas, a scarily mean performance from Adam Baldwin as a sort of proto-Jayne Cobb) while ramping up the black comedy to 11.

We'll just ignore how "Me so horny" got perverted into every white and black asshole's opening comeon to Asian girls (these morons don't know that credit ratings aren't sexually transmitted), but it says something about Kubrick's greatness/genius/whatever as a director and writer that so many images, lines, and other snapshots from "FMJ," "2001," "A Clockwork Orange," and "The Shining" are forever ingrained into Western pop culture.