Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Kubricks rendition of the screenplay and novel, The Short Timers, by Gustav Hasford, must rank alongside Apoclaypse Now and Platoon as perhaps the greatest Vietnam War film ever made. In my mind, however, it fits neatly between the two, mixing the intense cinematogaphry of Francis Ford Coppola and the dire realism of Oliver Stone to provide a somewhat different approach to a war film, centering its focus primarily on the individual experience of a new recruit.

The film begins at boot camp on day one of the new recruits training at Parris Island. Each soldier is given a nickname by the crazed Drill Instructor Sergeant Hartman, with our main character being given the nickname Joker, (played by a young Matthew Modine). From this point we are given a journey into the trials and tribulations of your average soldier, the conflict between Hartman and a less able marine, Pyle, and finally the shipment of fresh marines to battle in Vietnam. In many respects, the film reaches its high point at boot camp, and most particulary during the intense confrontation between Pyle and Hartman that eventually leads to Pyles descent into insanity.

From here on in, we are switched from the brutal dramtisation skills of Kubrick at boot camp to his very own form of intense cinematography in the climatic battle scenes of the Tet offensive. In fact, the entire film was shot in England from August 1985 to September of 1986; again, Kubrick refused to leave England, even if it meant refurbishing an entire town. The Parris Island scenes were easily accounted for; they were shot at a real military training camp in Bassingbourne; the barracks were built at Enfield. The Vietnam city of Hue was reconstructed in an abandoned 1930's gasworks town by the Thames named Becton. Working from still photographs of Hue in 1968, demoltion teams worked around the clock, laying charges and destroying entire buildings to make sure that every detail, even every rock that was filmed by the camera, was an absolute carbon copy of what is found in Vietnam itself. Even Kubrick was amazed by the work, saying of his own set: "I don't think anybody's ever had a set like that".

Despite the massive operation, the full cost of the film was a fairly small $17 million, tiny compared to the standards set some ten years later. Another famous story to come out of the film was the tale of Lee Ermy, originally hired as technical advisor on the set, but later given the part of Drill Sergeant Hartman after Kubrick closely observed how he crudely handled actors during filming. Ermy was in fact a former Parris Island drill instructor, and many of the infamous abuse that Hartman hurls at the recruits during the film are his own creations.

On a sour note for Kubrick, some critics labelled the battle scene cinematography as bland and repititious; others saw the film merely as a collection of short stories with beginnings, but never with middles or ends. But in the end, we must give Kubrick the credit for achieving all that he set out to achieve: to portray the distasteful irony between the desire for combat and true terror of war. He does this yet again by straying from the workings of Hasford's original novel on which the film is based, which was really a direct dialogue of action rather than a book of descriptive energy. The film, on the other hand, provides the viewer with a perspective glance of war through a soldier's eyes, in the end giving the audience a chance to empathise with the trials of each and every soldier, and even portraying the real reaction of the soldiers to the war itself.