Full Metal Jacket Review
by Trey
The other night I watched Full Metal Jacket for the first time.
The movie follows a young Marine nicknamed Joker, and his experiences in Boot Camp in South Carolina, and then being sent out in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive.
The only things I knew about the movie beforehand were from the Boot Camp section. The hilarious but intimidating Lee Ermy Drill Instructor quotes have been shouted endlessly to me in jest throughout the years, and when Vincent D'onofrio was first cast as Kingpin in the Netflix Daredevil series back in 2015, I remember seeing a lot of discussion about his breakout performance in FMJ.
All of the scenes in the boot camp are so excellent, that it seems the second half of the film doesn't even exist! I didn't even know they they made it out of boot camp and get to Vietnam until I watched the movie! It's like everybody turns off the film after the Pvt. Pyle stuff.
There have been endless reviews and analysis done about what happen with Pvt. Pyle, the framing of the shots in the barracks, the “Kubrick Stare”, all of that stuff. I want to focus on what happens after all of that.
The second half of the movie is just as good as the first half! I don’t know why I haven’t heard anything about it through cultural osmosis like I have with Pvt. Pyle. Joker is now a reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. You really see that Joker is the only American who doesn't want to be a macho Rambo-like figure. Everyone else in the squad of Marines acts like a total abomination to the Vietnamese people. Even the head of the newspaper unit is telling the reporters to edit their headlines, telling them to not use the phrase "Seek and Destroy" and instead use "Sweep and Clear".
All of the Marines with the exception of Joker are scumbags. This isnt the light-hearted banter of the bug hunting Colonial Marines that you know from Aliens. The Marines in Full Metal Jacket have no problem gunning down women and children working in rice fields, they treat prostitutes like garbage, and they are generally just racist as heck towards all Vietnamese. At one point, a news crew comes in for some video interviews, and these Marines are all rattling off some insane quotes that are eyebrow raising at best, and despicable at worse. It really makes me wonder how bad things really were out there if this is what a fictionalized version looks like. Joker is the one character who you really see get broken down through the film. He shows sympathy to “the enemy”, but in the in the end, he weathered down and has to make a tough decision.
One thing that really captured my attention was the location where they shot the films end battle. The group of Marines is trying to get through a ruined city while pinned down by a sniper. The whole time, they are in this city block that has been completely destroyed. Collapsed buildings, garbage thrown everywhere, barrels of oil on fire, It really looks like a war happened here. This movie came out in 1987, if this were filmed today, everything would have been green screened. How did they film in this ruined city? Was is clever camera tricks with miniatures? Matte paintings? Did Stanley Kubrick really have a city block built and then blown up just so he could film a battle there and we could see it get more obliterated?
Turns out that the filming wasn’t done in Vietnam. It was done in London! Beckton Gas Works, known for mining coal gas, was already partially in ruins and was scheduled to be completely paved over. Kubrick had the half-destroyed buildings destroyed a little more (this time with appropriate bullet holes and craters from artillery), and dressed with Vietnam advertisements accurate for the era. All that was left was to plant some palm trees, and then you have the Battle of Huế in 1968. Very cool stuff!
Full Metal Jacket.
A very, very good film. I cannot recommend it enough!