Full Metal Jacket (1987)

In Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, the major battle scene depicts an engagement that the narrator tells us did not make the history books, "though it was memorable enough for those who took part." When he came to make a movie about Vietnam, a little after the various angst-ridden and fantastical takes by Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) and Oliver Stone (Platoon) had established an acid/napalm-haze cinematic vocabulary for the war, Kubrick built on this approach. Full Metal Jacket presents a grunt-level world in which all officers, commissioned or not, are ridiculous but deadly alien beings (even heroic Marines of so many Take the High Ground-type pictures are nicknamed kids without a clue of where they are or what they're taking.

Based on The Short-Timers, an autobiographical novel by Gustav Hasford, Full Metal Jacket is ruthless, comic, horrific, and affecting in equal measure, depicting areas of the war rarely glimpsed in movies. A long opening act is set entirely on Parris Island, the induction-and-training center. After a montage in which long-haired young men are shorn to become bald drones, the film is commandeered by the astonishing R. Lee Ermey as drill sergeant Hartman, whose obscene, inventive, relentless abuse against all recruits is designed to breakdown the "maggots" totally before they can be rebuilt into killing machines. In a lecture, Hartman takes pride in the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman learned to shoot in the Marines. The horrible irony of this sequence- which closely parallels the gladiator training regime in Sparticus - is that the logical payoff is the transformation of pudgy foul-up (Vincent d'Onofrio) into one Kubrick's grotesque ape-men, with a primal glare that echos the droogs of A Clockwork Orange and Jack Torrance of The Shining. The first thing the new-made Marine does is murder his tormentor-creator and kill himself.

After this, the Vietnam sequences are almost a relief, as Private Joker (Matthew Modine), a journalist, unbends a little only to be confronted with even more demented individuals - when asked how he can kill women and children, a helicopter gunner gives a technical answer ("It's easy, don't lead them so much"), while a colonel remarks, "Son, all I've ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God." The climax is a skirmish during a battle in the rubble of Hue City, in which Joker's platoon encounter a female Vietcong sniper. Nobody wins the encounter, and the Marines troop off into the night singing the Mickey Mouse Club Marching Song. Only Kubrick would dare tweak Disney like this.

Quote of the Day - Hartman - "I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a guy in the ass and not even have the goddamned common courtesy to give him a reacharound."

Tomorrow: A Clockwork Orange (1971)