I’ve recently watched Full Metal Jacket for the first time, and I’m really struggling trying not to tell people I watched Full Metal Alchemist.

I’m not even a huge FMA fan, though I kind of want to be and I own the first several volumes of the manga, but my comic and anime soaked brain somehow has decided that latter series is the pre-eminent “Full Metal” property in the world. So it’s been a lot of:

“What have you watched recently?”

“Full Metal Al… Jacket. Full Metal Jacket. That is the Full Metal I watched, no other one”.

Full Metal Jacket is a film by renowned director Stanley Kubrick that came out in 1987, which, if you had asked me before I watched it, is a solid ten years later than I would have guessed. I would have sworn this was a 70’s movie, and surely not a late 1980’s one! It’s Kubrick’s anti-war picture, and it is told in two halves.

The first half–more like the first act–takes place in boot camp, where a fresh crop of Marine recruits are gathered under the tutelage of a particularly nasty drill instructor. The focus here is on Leonard, aka Private Gomer Pile, as he struggles with camp and tries to make it through each day and each drill.

The back end of the movie sees the action move to Vietnam where one of the recruits from camp, Joker, is placed as a military reporter. He starts seeing firsthand what war is actually like.

So how does a movie with two such disparate halves stack up? Well…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Full Metal Jacket is very well shot and directed by Kubrick. The war moments are shaky and dirty and dusty, and they leave you feeling like you are in the thick of everything you are seeing. There are some longer uncut shot, too; the kind I always love. They aren’t huge stretches of the film, but they do their job to keep you unblinkingingly aware of what you are seeing.

The tension moments are lit well, too, and made to look incredibly foreboding. Or maybe “lit well” isn’t the correct turn of phrase, because it’s actually Kubrick’s usage of shadowing that creates the sensation. Leonard’s face as he slides into his own mental abyss, for instance, gets more and more shrouded in darkness, and by his final moments, he is awash in the dark. It’s really poignant directing from a master of the craft.  

+ Leonard in the first act and then Joker the rest of the way are engaging characters showing how pointless and awful service is from two different angles. R. Lee Ermey’s drill instructor is a great antagonist, too. The acting across the board is just really solid here.

Let’s look at Ermey first. He is shouting just about every line of dialogue he has, and he never ever runs out of energy. Given what we know about Kubrick’s penchant for multiple takes, it’s wild that the actor never lost steam. His bombasticity knows no bounds.

Then we have Vincent D’Onofrio as Leonard, who Ermey calls Gomer Pile. He is so damn pitiable for the first 85% of his character’s arc, and then he turns dark and seemingly sinister at the end of the first act. The switch that flips within him is damn near visible, and the way he continues sliding even after he starts accomplishing tasks at the camp is striking.

Matthew Modine rounds out the core trio as Joker, and after the first act, he becomes our protagonist the rest of the way. The back end of this flick isn’t as good as the front–we’ll get there in a sec!–but Modine plays an intelligent young man who is full of what appear to be contradictory ideas about war. He’s a war reporter who gets embedded with a unit after the Tet Offensive, and he makes the second and third acts as watchable as possible.

– But, yeah, given that…

As everything I’ve heard has told me, this is a movie of two halves, and the first half is more engaging and interesting. The second half does a solid job portraying the horrors of war, sure, but it’s the first half and its tale of Leonard and the drill instructor that really emphasizes how even the non-war parts of the military are dehumanizing.

It’s strange. The bulk of the flick is after training. And it’s actually about the senseless violence of war, so it should be the carrying part of it all. But D’Onofrio and Ermey’s struggle against each other is so engrossing, that the stuff that comes later just can’t really compete. Everything I went into this movie knowing about it was from the first act. That’s the part people talk about and the part that makes for great clips.

– Some of the needle drops are really… curious, I guess is the best way to put it. They run counter to the mood of the picture on screen, and they are so loud that they are distracting. I think they might be so adversarial to what we are seeing in a way to show the “duality of man” (as Joker puts it), and to make us confront happy, dancey tunes with a harsh reality of brutality. But it’s still a strange choice.

There is a use of that “Bird Is The Word” or whatever it is called during the wartime part of the movie that is just so damn counter to what is going on, it threw me for a loop. Kubrick being Kubrick, I know he had reasons for doing what he did. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t put me off a bit.

OVERALL

If Full Metal Jacket was only the first act, and it was extended out into feature length, we’d be looking at a top-shelf offering. That stretch of the picture is that damn powerful. Unfortunately, the back end–which SHOULD be the soul of the movie–is a little forgettable and negligent, and it feels like an entirely different plot from what came before. So this was good–it was even Very Good–but I couldn’t help but wish it was… a different film.