Full Metal Jacket

The Vietnam War (1959-1975) has enjoyed a strong legacy of cinematic remembrance over the years, as generations sought to explore the dark heart of the USA's anti-communist crusade. Perhaps the most successful attempt at revisiting this dark period in American history, Full Metal Jacket is a sobering and harrowing account of innocence lost.

Told over two segments, the first half of the film introduces us to the fresh-faced young men as they undergo their first initiation into the US Marine Corps – having their heads shaved. Over jaunty pop music we see scores of bare heads exposed within a few minutes. It's a clear and very bold depiction of youth and innocence being physically stripped away. When we later see these men again, they are lined up in their barracks wearing their military fatigues, indistinguishable now from each other. Clones.

And then, like a bolt out of the blue, the relative calm is broken as one of cinema's most notoriously vile characters, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Emery in a frightfully visceral performance), makes his auspicious entrance to provide context. This is Parris Island, South Carolina, and this is the Marine Corps boot camp where ordinary men are conditioned to become professional killers for their country. Hartman's introductory monologue to the new recruits as their drill sergeant sets the scene for the hardship to follow:

"If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training... you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of death, praying for war. But until that day you are pukes! You're the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings! You are nothing but unorganised grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit! Because I am hard, you will not like me. But the more you hate me, the more you will learn. I am hard, but I am fair! There is no racial bigotry here! I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops, or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless! And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps! Do you maggots understand that?"

That is one of his milder speeches. There is not a cuss word, sexually explicit insult or derogatory term he won't use in the guise of motivation and inspiration. The principal newbie, through whom we discover this hellish world, is Private Joker (real names are quickly dispensed with at boot camp as every recruit is given a nickname). He is a genteel idealist who seems at odds with the surroundings, played by Matthew Modine. We also meet the overweight and clumsy Pvt. Gomer Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio), whose frequent errors make him the predatory gunnery sergeant's favourite target.

When Pyle eventually does show promise, it's as a marksman and he begins to relish the role of empowered killer. It would seem that the gunnery sergeant's unsympathetic and remorseless brand of training has paid off. Until, on the eve of the recruits' graduation, things take a shockingly murderous turn as Pyle exacts his revenge. And we see Stanley Kubrick's direction at his best – in a portrait of the psychotic breakdown.

By having Jack Nicholson maniacally hack through a door in The Shining and Malcolm McDowell and his Droogs go on sadistic rampages in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick ventured into the most chilling parts of the modern male psyche. He portrayed horror as more than the freakishly frightening figures of Nosferatu or Freddy Krueger, but something much more normal, much deeper, and harder to defeat.

The second act of Full Metal Jacket takes us to the battlefields of Vietnam where Pvt. Joker has distanced himself from armed combat by working as a correspondent for the military newspaper "Stars and Stripes". But when his base is attacked by the North Vietnamese Army, Joker is forced into battle and gets a disturbing view into what the role of soldier demands – cold blood, something Joker has not achieved as he chooses to wear a peace sign on his uniform.

When he teams up with a company who have seen too much and fought too long on the frontlines, the savagery of the war becomes all too real for him. The only joy these men seem to find is in the occasional tryst with a skinny Vietnamese prostitute who always promises "me love you long time" (the film made the quote something of a popular catchphrase).

When Joker is allowed his first kill – a sniper who has just killed Cowboy whom Joker befriended at boot camp – his target turns out to be a Vietnamese girl, no older than 13. Moral questions begin to swim through Joker's mind: will killing the wounded girl achieve peace? Is peace even an ideal worth fighting for when its instrument is death and destruction? These are the questions that Full Metal Jacket leaves us with, long after Joker has made his irrevocable decision and the troops march on to their next target, chanting the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. And, like any war movie worth its blood-stained celluloid, these are questions and challenges left to the viewer to consider.

More than 30 years after the US retreated out of Vietnam, its tattered tail between its legs, we find ourselves in very much the same place – with US troops occupying territories in the Middle East and bringing armed conflict into our lives on a daily basis. What has humanity learned from its past? Is the "kill or be killed" rationality really helping us towards a brighter future?

Even though it wears its humanist heart on its sleeves, Full Metal Jacket is less optimistic about the possibility of finding a solution to these questions.

- Shaheema Barodien

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