Full Metal Jacket


Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 war film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay he co-wrote with Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford. The film is based on Hasford's 1979 autobiographical novel The Short-Timers. It stars Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Onofrio, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, and Arliss Howard.
The storyline follows a platoon of U.S. Marines through their boot camp training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina. The first half of the film focuses primarily on privates J. T. Davis and Leonard Lawrence, nicknamed "Joker" and "Pyle" respectively, who struggle under their abusive drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. The second half portrays the experiences of Joker and other Marines in the Vietnamese cities of Da Nang and Huế during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. The film's title refers to the full metal jacket bullet used by military servicemen.
Full Metal Jacket was theatrically released in the United States on June 26, 1987, by Warner Bros., and in the United Kingdom on September 11, 1987. It was the last of Kubrick's films to be released during his lifetime. The film grossed $120 million against a budget of $16.5–30 million and was widely acclaimed. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and was also nominated for two BAFTA Awards, while Ermey was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for his performance. In 2001, the American Film Institute placed the film at number 95 in its poll titled "AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills."

Plot

During the Vietnam War, a group of US Marine recruits arrive for eight weeks of Recruit Training at Parris Island. Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman uses harsh methods to train them for combat. Among the recruits are the wisecracking J. T. Davis, who is nicknamed "Joker" after mocking Hartman, and the overweight and dim-witted Leonard Lawrence, whom Hartman nicknames "Gomer Pyle".
Hartman relentlessly targets Pyle for failing to meet his expectations, and later tasks Joker with mentoring him. Hartman discovers a jelly doughnut inside Pyle's footlocker, which enrages him as food is not permitted in the barracks. As the rest of the platoon "have not given Private Pyle the proper motivation", he implements a policy of collective punishment for any of Pyle's mistakes, and continues to exclude him from training activities. In retaliation, the recruits haze Pyle with a blanket party, which Joker reluctantly participates in under pressure. Pyle appears to reinvent himself into a model recruit with particular expertise in marksmanship, which impresses Hartman. Joker, however, worries Pyle may be suffering a mental breakdown after hearing him talk to his rifle.
The night before the new Marines are to leave Parris Island, Joker, on fire watch duty, discovers Pyle in the barracks latrine loading his M14 rifle with live ammunition, executing drill commands, and loudly reciting the Rifleman's Creed. Awakened by the commotion, Hartman orders Pyle to put down the rifle, who instead aims it at him. Provoked by his insults, Pyle shoots Hartman dead before aiming the weapon at Joker, who responds "easy, Leonard." Pyle sits back down on the toilet and commits suicide.
By January 1968, Joker is a sergeant based in Da Nang for the newspaper Stars and Stripes alongside Private First Class "Rafter Man", a combat photographer. Their base is unsuccessfully raided as part of the Tet Offensive. The following morning, Joker and Rafter Man are sent to Phu Bai, where Joker searches for and reunites with Sergeant "Cowboy" Evans, a friend from Parris Island who now serves in a unit dubbed the "Lusthog Squad".
While reporting at a site where civilians were massacred, a Marine Corps colonel challenges Joker to explain the inconsistency of his wearing a peace symbol pin button on his uniform's lapel, while having "Born to Kill" written on his helmet. Joker claims he does not know meaning, nor where he procured the button, but when pressed, surmises he intended it as commentary on the duality of man.
During the Battle of Huế, platoon leader Lieutenant Walter J. "'Mr. Touchdown" Schinoski is killed, apparently by shrapnel, leading to squad leader Sergeant "Crazy Earl" taking his place in command. In a later sequence backed by Surfin' Bird music and involving a documenting film crew, Cowboy looks toward the camera and shouts "Hey, start the cameras, this is Vietnam, the movie!". Later, a booby-trapped rabbit toy kills Crazy Earl, leaving Cowboy in command. Becoming lost in the city, the squad is attacked by a Viet Cong sniper who fatally shoots "Eightball" and "Doc Jay". As the squad closes in on the sniper's location, Cowboy is also killed.
Assuming command, squad machine gunner "Animal Mother" leads an attack on the sniper. Joker locates her first, but his M16 rifle jams. The sniper, a teenage girl, overhears this and opens fire, while Rafter Man shoots and mortally wounds her. As the squad converges on the sniper, she begs for death, leading to an argument over whether to kill her or leave her to die in pain. Animal Mother agrees to a mercy killing but only if Joker will handle it; after some hesitation, Joker shoots her. As night falls, the Marines march to the Perfume River singing the "Mickey Mouse March". A narration of Joker's thoughts conveys that, despite his being "in a world of shit", he is glad to be alive, and is "not afraid."

Cast

  • Matthew Modine as Private James T. "Joker" Davis, a wisecracking young Marine. On set, Modine kept a diary that in 2005 was adapted into a book and in 2013 into an interactive app.
  • Adam Baldwin as Sergeant "Animal Mother", a nihilistic, combat-hungry machine gunner in the Lusthog Squad who takes pride in killing enemy soldiers, and scorns any authority other than his own.
  • Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence, an overweight, slow-minded recruit who is the subject of Hartman's mockery. According to Kubrick, Pyle was "the hardest part to cast in the whole movie"; Modine suggested D'Onofrio to Kubrick. D'Onofrio was required to gain for the role.
  • R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant L. Hartman, a harsh, foul-mouthed and ruthless senior drill instructor. Ermey had played a similar character in the 1978 Vietnam War film The Boys in Company C. Ermey used his actual experience as a U.S. Marines drill instructor in the Vietnam War to improvise much of his dialogue.
  • Dorian Harewood as Corporal "Eightball", an African-American member of the squad unfazed by racial slurs, and Animal Mother's closest friend.
  • Arliss Howard as Private "Cowboy" Evans, a friend of Joker originally from Texas and a member of the Lusthog Squad.
  • Kevyn Major Howard as Private First Class "Rafter Man", a combat photographer.
  • Ed O'Ross as First Lieutenant Walter J. "Mr. Touchdown" Schinoski, the Lusthog Squad's platoon leader.
  • John Terry as First Lieutenant Lockhart, the editor in charge of the Da Nang division of Stars and Stripes.
  • Kieron Jecchinis as Sergeant "Crazy Earl", the first Lusthog Squad leader.
  • Bruce Boa as the Colonel who scolds Joker for writing “Born to Kill” on his helmet and simultaneously wearing a peace symbol on his lapel.
  • Kirk Taylor as Private "Payback", a squad member.
  • John Stafford as "Doc Jay," a Navy hospital corpsman providing medical support for the squad.
  • Tim Colceri as a ruthless and sadistic helicopter door gunner who suggests that Joker and Rafter Man write a story about him. Colceri, a former Marine, was originally slated to play Hartman, a role that went to Ermey. Kubrick gave Colceri this smaller part as a consolation.
  • Ian Tyler as Lieutenant Cleves, an officer present at the uncovering of a mass grave.
  • Gary Landon Mills as Donlon, a squad member who works as a radio operator.
  • Sal Lopez as "T.H.E. Rock", a squad member.
  • Papillon Soo Soo as a Da Nang prostitute
  • Ngọc Lê as the Viet Cong sniper.
  • Peter Edmund as Private "Snowball" Brown, a recruit in Hartman's platoon who briefly becomes a squad leader before Hartman gives Joker the position.
  • Antu N'Jai as a recruit.
  • Steve Boucher as a recruit.
  • Stanley Kubrick as Sergeant Murphy, whom Cowboy communicates with by radio

    Themes

Michael Pursell's essay "Full Metal Jacket: The Unravelling of Patriarchy" was an early, in-depth consideration of the film's two-part structure and its criticism of masculinity. Pursell wrote that the film shows "war and pornography as facets of the same system".
Many reviewers praised the military brainwashing themes in the boot-camp portion of the film while viewing the film's second half as more confusing and disjointed. Rita Kempley of The Washington Post wrote, "it's as if they borrowed bits of every war movie to make this eclectic finale." Roger Ebert saw the film as an attempt to tell a story of individual characters and the war's effects on them. According to Ebert, the result is a shapeless film that feels "more like a book of short stories than a novel". Julian Rice, in his book Kubrick's Hope, saw the second part of the film as a continuation of Joker's psychic journey in his attempt to understand human evil.
Tony Lucia, in his 1987 review of Full Metal Jacket for the Reading Eagle, examined the themes of Kubrick's career, suggesting "the unifying element may be the ordinary man dwarfed by situations too vast and imposing to handle". Lucia refers to the "military mentality" in this film and also said the theme covers "a man testing himself against his own limitations", and concluded: "Full Metal Jacket is the latest chapter in an ongoing movie which is not merely a comment on our time or a time past, but on something that reaches beyond."
British critic Gilbert Adair wrote, "Kubrick's approach to language has always been reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic in nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all the whims, shades and modulations of personal expression."
Michael Herr wrote of his work on the screenplay, "The substance was single-minded, the old and always serious problem of how you put into a film or a book the living, behaving presence of what Jung called the shadow, the most accessible of archetypes, and the easiest to experience ... War is the ultimate field of Shadow-activity, where all of its other activities lead you. As they expressed it in Vietnam, 'Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no Evil, for I the Evil'."