Full Metal Jacket (1987) *****

 

When it comes to war movies, there is none more iconic than “Full Metal Jacket.” Released one year after “Top Gun,” Stanley Kubrick's naturalistic, Vietnam War masterpiece is something of an anti-”Top Gun.” Where “Top Gun” was a celebration of the glories of military service, which measurably boosted recruiting, “Full Metal Jacket” was all about the inhumanity and futility of the war machine. I don't think anyone signed up for the military because they watched “Full Metal Jacket!”

The film is really 2 movies rolled into 1. The first part of the film is a novella about the cruelty of military basic training. We meet Joker (Matthew Modine), a smart-aleck recruit whose sense of humor immediately earns him the ire of drill sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). Hartman winds up warming to Joker, who is competent, forthright, and “has got guts.” He puts Joker in charge of training up Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio), an overweight, mildly retarded, sweet-natured recruit who cannot seem to stop screwing up.

Hartman has become the standard by which movie drill sergeants are measured. As depicted by the brilliant R. Lee Ermey, he is loud, overbearing, brutal, and bullying. Part of what makes “Full Metal Jacket” great is that it allows Hartman to be something more than a complete villain, however. This is depicted in the grudging respect he grants Joker, and in his attempts to encourage Pyle when he starts to get himself together. He believes it is necessary to be hard on his recruits, because they will need toughness and discipline to survive in the war zone to which they are destined. The problem is that he has only one way to interact with them. He breaks them down as a bully, then grants them the reward of approval when they show improvement. That works for many, but not all. Hartman is part and emblem of a Procrustean military machine that takes young men of various talents and sensibilities and forces them all to fit into the same mold. Anyone who cannot fit the mold is sacrificed un-caringly.

The second, longer portion of the movie is set in Vietnam, where we find Joker assigned as a military journalist for “Stars-and-Stripes.” There, he finds a demoralized American military whose soldiers have no idea what they are fighting for and cannot tell their “allies” from their enemies. He sees a Vietnamese population that is simply tired of war, and which sees the Americans more as occupiers than as saviors. He is not able to write about any of this. Joker is told that they publish two types of stories in “Stars-and-Stripes”: tales of battlefield heroics, and heartwarming stories about soldiers winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

Out in the field, Joker is embedded with a platoon and sees firsthand what the war is like, with the outgunned Vietcong relying more on sniper fire and booby-traps than on frontal assaults. In this brutal, mystifying war, Joker finds, survival relies less on the kind of discipline and toughness he learned in basic training, and more on dumb luck. It's a disheartening struggle, where doing the right thing seems impossible.

“Full Metal Jacket” is, in one sense, just one in a line of naturalistic, cynical Vietnam War movies, preceded by films like 1986's “Platoon” and 1979's “Apocalypse Now.” “Full Metal Jacket,” however, is distinguished by its performances and its wit. We see the stories through the eyes of Joker, whose perceptive sense of humor makes the scenes imminently memorable and quotable. Then there's R. Lee Ermey's drill sergeant, who became the standard mold for movie drill sergeants the way Robert Romero's “Night of the Living Dead” monsters became the standard for zombies. Combined with memorable performances from Vincent D'Onofrio, Adam Baldwin (from “Firefly”), and Dorian Harewood, it adds up to an unforgettable and imminently re-watchable war film. As Joker and his buddies march into the sunset, singing the Mickey Mouse Club song, we are left with a message that would be familiar to Voltaire's Candide or to Shakespeare's Hamlet: No one has been saved; nothing has been learned; and the best you can do is try to take care of those close to you.

5 stars out of 5