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Full Metal Jacket (1980)
Starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, and R. Lee Ermey. Cinematography by Douglas Milsome. Edited by Martin Hunter. Produced by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, and Stanley Kubrick. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
New recruits swarm in by the busload to South Carolina’s Parris Island to begin their grueling boot camp experience that will ultimately end with a one-way ticket to the Vietnam War. Young Marines are demoralized and dehumanized, only to be reassembled as “killing machines”. This is the case for Private “Joker” who literally barely survives the experience, which is more than can be said of some of his fellow recruits.
Joker is then shipped overseas where he works as a military reporter in DaNang. With the bloody Tet Offensive looming on the horizon, Joker is sent to Hue City to capture the story. His darkest desires for deadly conflict are realized when he finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a highly explosive battle.
War. Huh. Good God, y’all. What is it good for? Well, it provided an opportunity for a film artist like Stanley Kubrick to create some of the most impactful and memorable images ever put into celluloid. Say it again. Kubrick had been considering a war film since just after the release of The Shining, but couldn’t set himself on just the right story.
It was in the last remaining months of 1982 that he came across Gustav Hasford’s satirical novel The Short-Timers and was immediately smitten with its potential for film adaptation. Collaborating with Vietnam correspondent and author Michael Herr, Kubrick spent the next eighteen months translating his extensive treatment into a manageable screenplay.
Kubrick named his film after a caption he found in a gun catalogue that he described as “beautiful and tough and kind of poetic”. Production began on Full Metal Jacket in August of 1985 and would run for an exhaustive thirty nine weeks. Unlike respectable peers like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, Kubrick’s war/anti-war epic breaks the convention of the three act film and presents itself as almost two separate features that share only a small handful of similar characters.
Many have referred to Full Metal Jacket as the greatest war movie ever and few would disagree. Kubrick had truly “one-upped” himself once again. Long live the king.
Budget: $17,000,000
Total US Gross: $46,357,676
Genre: War
Runtime: 116 Minutes
US Release Date: 6/26/87
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (US intended ratio)
Awards:
Academy Awards:
Nominated for best screenplay based on previous material.
Golden Globes:
Nominated for best supporting actor.
Writers Guild of America:
Nominated for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
American Film Institute’s Top 100 Lists:
100 Years… 100 Thrills (#95).
Tagline: In Vietnam The Wind Doesn’t Blow It Sucks.
Quote: “The deadliest weapon in the world is a marine and his rifle! It is your killer instinct which must be harnessed if you expect to survive in combat! Your rifle is only a tool… it is a hard heart that kills!”
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