Full Metal Jacket (War Collection)

Kubricks penultimate movie and his first since The Shining some seven years before. By now the steadicam for Kubrick rules supreme and the military proves to be the perfect subject matter for such a freewheeling device.
Kubricks lens glides, follows, and reports the life of Joker as he trains in boot camp and then sees combat in Vietnam. Joker is a soldier and a reporter for "Stars and Stripes" which puts him in an internal conflict summed up by his reprimand by a Colonel. Joker is the story; part of Americas and his own history-a killer but critical of his ability to do so and whether he should kill in the first place. At the crunch he is found wanting. He cannot kill up close, but he can out of mercy, which his less educated comrades mistake for the ultimate "hardcore" act.
Yet as much as Joker is our route through Full Metal Jacket it is Gunnery Sgt Hartmann who is most remembered. Such is the pace and rhythm of his verbal assaults in the first forty minutes that when we… more »

Kubricks penultimate movie and his first since The Shining some seven years before. By now the steadicam for Kubrick rules supreme and the military proves to be the perfect subject matter for such a freewheeling device.
Kubricks lens glides, follows, and reports the life of Joker as he trains in boot camp and then sees combat in Vietnam. Joker is a soldier and a reporter for "Stars and Stripes" which puts him in an internal conflict summed up by his reprimand by a Colonel. Joker is the story; part of Americas and his own history-a killer but critical of his ability to do so and whether he should kill in the first place. At the crunch he is found wanting. He cannot kill up close, but he can out of mercy, which his less educated comrades mistake for the ultimate "hardcore" act.
Yet as much as Joker is our route through Full Metal Jacket it is Gunnery Sgt Hartmann who is most remembered. Such is the pace and rhythm of his verbal assaults in the first forty minutes that when we leave him on Paris Island the film never quite recaptures that level of genius and poetry.