Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Country: GB
Technical: col 116m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Lee Ermey
Synopsis:
Recruits train to be marines and experience their baptism of fire in Vietnam at the hands of a female sniper.
Review:
A superficially conventional war film (The Training/The Field) is in the end a reversal of expectations. As far as the dehumanizing effects of war are concerned, nothing could possibly match the process of humiliation meted out during the first half. When this gives way to the customary 'main course', the film's two most interesting characters are gone (Private Pyle and the drill sergeant) and the narrative loses its grip with repetitive sequences involving prostitution and mediatisation. However, the sniper climax is significant in both putting the training into perspective (nothing can prepare these men for the ruthless baiting they endure) and in revealing one more card: the conflation of sex and violence present elsewhere in the Kubrick canon ('Hardcore...', murmurs one of the soldiers as Joker deals the coup de grâce to the girl sniper).
Country: GB
Technical: col 116m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Lee Ermey
Synopsis:
Recruits train to be marines and experience their baptism of fire in Vietnam at the hands of a female sniper.
Review:
A superficially conventional war film (The Training/The Field) is in the end a reversal of expectations. As far as the dehumanizing effects of war are concerned, nothing could possibly match the process of humiliation meted out during the first half. When this gives way to the customary 'main course', the film's two most interesting characters are gone (Private Pyle and the drill sergeant) and the narrative loses its grip with repetitive sequences involving prostitution and mediatisation. However, the sniper climax is significant in both putting the training into perspective (nothing can prepare these men for the ruthless baiting they endure) and in revealing one more card: the conflation of sex and violence present elsewhere in the Kubrick canon ('Hardcore...', murmurs one of the soldiers as Joker deals the coup de grâce to the girl sniper).
Country: GB
Technical: col 116m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Lee Ermey
Synopsis:
Recruits train to be marines and experience their baptism of fire in Vietnam at the hands of a female sniper.
Review:
A superficially conventional war film (The Training/The Field) is in the end a reversal of expectations. As far as the dehumanizing effects of war are concerned, nothing could possibly match the process of humiliation meted out during the first half. When this gives way to the customary 'main course', the film's two most interesting characters are gone (Private Pyle and the drill sergeant) and the narrative loses its grip with repetitive sequences involving prostitution and mediatisation. However, the sniper climax is significant in both putting the training into perspective (nothing can prepare these men for the ruthless baiting they endure) and in revealing one more card: the conflation of sex and violence present elsewhere in the Kubrick canon ('Hardcore...', murmurs one of the soldiers as Joker deals the coup de grâce to the girl sniper).