Help Me I Don't Even What Is This: “Full Metal Jacket”

Memorial Day just came and went, and usually I watch war movies to celebrate. But specifically war movies that convey the idea that war is hell, even if it is sometimes justified. In past years I've watched “Paths of Glory”, “A Bridge Too Far”, and “Saving Private Ryan”, but this year I thought I'd pop in a war movie that's constantly referenced and considered a “classic” but that I hadn't seen yet, and that's Full Metal Jacket.

So do the prostitutes, as the movie makes abundantly clear.

This is going to be a shorter review than normal, because I don't really have anything to say about Full Metal Jacket that hasn't already been said. It really did feel like half of a great movie, and half of a pretty good if less memorable movie. Although to me the disconnect in tone and energy between the two segments of the movie felt greater than that; it felt like it could have been called, We Now Return You To Your Standard Vietnam War Movie Already In Progress.

Don't get me wrong, the second half was good. It was good. It was just fine. And it did have some very memorable dialogue and characters, particularly Animal Mother played by Adam Baldwin, a character I like to imagine is Jayne's great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather from Earth That Was.

And Mal's weepier great-great-grandfather is in Saving Private Ryan! COINCIDENCE!?

But the first half is fucking iconic. It has an energy and a momentum to it that almost completely goes away in the second half. The first half, despite being a rather slow burn, draws you in the whole time, and most of that can be credited to R. Lee Ermey. By God, I don't care if he plays the same character in everything if it's this good. He's fascinating to watch, and so is Vincent D'Onofrio. He's almost unrecognizable as a younger, fatter version of himself, and it's fascinating to see the tone of his scenes change. At first, you laugh, because it's funny seeing a fat, dumb recruit fail epically at basic training. It wouldn't look out of place in Stripes. But there's a growing sense of unease as Ermey's character becomes more abusive, and as you can see D'Onofrio's character's pain grow, masked by his cheerful, oblivious nature. It's enthralling to watch the character descend into madness...you understand why he does, and why he commits his final acts of violence, but at the same time he's never wholly justified, and the audience is never completely on his side, considering he probably should have just quit. It's made abundantly clear that he is not fit to serve in the Marines.

And upon reflection, it's nice to see the main character Joker's character arc foreshadowed in this first half. (Spoilers ahead)

There's a scene where the Marine recruits decide to mete out some punishment to D'Onofrio's character because the drill sergeant has started to punish them for his fuck-ups as a way of guilting him into shaping up. They hold D'Onofrio down and beat him with bars of soap in towels, and this is the incident that arguably leads to D'Onofrio's psychotic break. But there's a nice moment of foreshadowing where Joker hesitates to join in in the violence, but at the urging of his fellows, he finally puts in a whomp on D'Onofrio. It's a good parallel for the climactic scene of the movie, where Joker has had no on-screen kills so far, and it's implied he's had no kills at all, being chiefly a correspondent. But when his squad finally takes out a Viet-Cong sniper that's killed half of their men, he discovers that the dreaded shooter is just a little girl. While his squadmates want to leave her to die, she begs them to kill her, and at his squadmate's urging, he puts her out of her misery.

It's one of the few ways that the second half ties into the first half of the movie. In that way, Full Metal Jacket is a lot like Stripes. Amazing first half in basic training, pretty good second half that kind of doesn't know what to do with itself. Full Metal Jacket's second half in particular has a meandering, aimless quality to it, almost a series of vignettes as we follow Joker on his journey through Vietnam. Now, Stanley Kubrick is nothing if not a meticulous, even micromanaging director. There is almost nothing in his films that is done without purpose. Even the mistake that HAL makes playing chess in 2001 acts as subtle foreshadowing that he's starting to break down, and most people wouldn't even notice it. So I'm inclined to think that the meandering nature of the second half is on purpose, to contrast all of the sense of divine mission and drive that is hammered into the Marines during basic training. Maybe it's a metaphor for the aimless, senseless quality of the war in Vietnam.

But even if it's on purpose, that decision makes for a decidedly lesser second half. It's not bad per se, it's just not as great as the beginning. The movie's general thematic ennui is reflected nicely in Joker's hesitant line to a general when asked why his helmet says “Born to Kill”, but he wears a button with the Peace symbol on it: “I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.”

And that's what the second half feels like. It's enjoyable, it doesn't sink the movie, and you get a sense of some greater themes. The whole movie averages out to “very good”. But it does feel like if you ask him, Stanley Kubrick would say, “I think I was trying to say that war is pretty bad, and that there are a lot of contradictions, I guess.”