High Frank
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Full Metal Jacket
« on: November 21st, 2012, 5:13pm »
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Kubrick would leave his imprint on the Vietnam film with Full Metal Jacket, based on the novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, albeit right on the heels of Oliver Stone's north face triclimate Platoon in 1986. For me, as well as many others, this would be the most frustrating and confounding of all of his films. The reason being that the film feels like two films that don't quite match.
One is an undeniable classic and the other has some excellent moments but doesn't seem to add up to much. The first and best movie lasts for the opening 45 minutes. The second movie lasts the remaining hour and ten minutes. The first details the story of a group of marine recruits who undergo basic training on Paris Island. We see them verbally and physically broken down by their drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R Lee Ermey). The recruits are known only by the names Hartman gives them and thus so they are anonymous. The only two recruits that come into any kind of focus are the smart-ass Joker (Matthew Modine) and the dim-witted Gomer Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio).Pyle's weight and lack of intelligence makes him the whipping boy for Hartman as well as the squad and it is painful if not downright horrifying what he is subjected to. Indeed the film's greatest scenes are between Pyle and Hartman. We see for the first time in film how young men are systematically broken down and rebuilt as killing machines. The class graduates and is given their orders for Vietnam. During the last night in the barracks, a tragedy occurs that will mark the rest of the film.The second film then shifts to Da Nang where Joker and a gung ho soldier named Rafter Man have drawn correspondence duty for the Army newspaper Star and Stripes. The strong focus and grip that the film has held us in, suddenly is gone and it seems that the narrative has been thrown out and we are watching random scenes that don't appear to have any continuity or meaning to them. Joker and Rafter Man are sent to follow the hard core combat unit "The Lusthogs" which one of Joker's fellow marines from boot camp, Cowboy (Arliss Howard) belongs to as well as the insane, battle hungry Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin) north face nuptse vest. Now upon numerous viewings and the benefit of age, some opinions I had about the film have changed. The first half is an undisputed masterpiece and the film never really does recover after the boot camp scenes Cheap North Face Jacket. Ermey paints such a fiercely profane portrait of a drill instructor that it's easy to see how he filled the position in real life.
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