Review of Full Metal Jacket (1987) by Joshc — 10 Feb 2008

Stanley Kubrick's daunting two-part monolith also communicates on a gut level, yet it is the most deceptively simple work he has ever made--and even more resistant to easy interpretation than his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A friend of mine who was a Marine sergeant in the Tet offensive assures me that so many details are botched that the film is worthless as history; insofar as coscreenwriter Michael Herr has recently pointed out that Kubrick set out to make a certain kind of war film before he settled on either Vietnam or Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers, I see no reason to doubt this testimony.

But conventional realism seems so far from Kubrick's purposes that I can't dismiss the film for these infidelities either. I'm more inclined to ponder lead actor Matthew Modine's provocative suggestion that Kubrick's relationship to other commercial directors is analogous to the position of the early Cubists.

Combining this sense of poetic abstraction with a subject as "hot" as Vietnam (or colonialism in general) is a risky and daring move, but I can't side with those who fault Kubrick for "coldness" simply because they can't anticipate or see through him (as they can with a genuine iceberg like Brian De Palma).

It's been at least a quarter of a century since I've seen Kubrick's awkward first feature Fear and Desire (1953)--long since suppressed by Kubrick himself--but it is that touching and compassionate amateur film about young men at war, set in no particular place or time, that Full Metal Jacket evoked for me, refined, perfected, and chiseled to such a fine point that it fully expresses what the earlier film only implied.

The vision may be hard as nails, but it is one without villains or other easy bromides.