Full Metal Jacket
Based on Gustav Hasford';s novel The Short Timers, a two-segment look at the effect of the military mindset and war itself on Vietnam era Marines. The first half follows a group of recruits in boot camp under the command of the punishing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. The second half shows one of those recruits, Joker, covering the war as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, focusing on the Tet offensive.
25 January 1950, Florida, USA
1967, London, England, UK
27 February 1962, Winnetka, Illinois, USA
8 November 1954
June 24, 2015
[Kubrick's] genius, and perhaps burden, is to see the insanity in us all and to make it seem so terrifyingly normal.
June 21, 2013
It may seem too spare, too clinical, its moments of war even too familiar for some. But, aiming for minds as well as hearts, Kubrick hits his target squarely.
August 24, 2008
Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie grunt.
January 09, 2015
...a justifiably iconic war film.
October 09, 2016
Full Metal Jacket, produced, directed and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, is not an easy film to watch, but from the first frame to the last, it is a riveting one.
June 21, 2013
If his considerable achievement in this long- awaited film falls short of his Olympian standards, there is a reason that ought to give Kubrick some satisfaction. The world has caught up with Kubrick and what he has to say.
June 21, 2013
What gives this story its power is not really its originality, but the relentlessness of Kubrick's black-comic vision and the tightness of his focus.
October 25, 2015
One of the classics of war cinema, it's not nearly as good as its legend suggests. But it's pretty good.
June 21, 2013
No amount of stylistic analysis, however, is likely to explain why a man would devote more than three years of his life to making a war movie in which violent death isn't meant to move us. Does Kubrick really think we're not callous enough about war?
June 21, 2013
It's a great piece of filmmaking, diminished only by a second act that fails to live up to the first act of the Marines in training.
July 05, 2014
One of Kubrick's foremost triumphs, a genuinely challenging and uncomfortable war film
June 21, 2013
There is a real fear at the heart of this monstrously armored, desperately defensive film.
