Full Metal Jacket

[Nickdfresh]

I think at the end when he shoots the girl he is killing himself and representing the death of the innocence of his generation.

Or some shit...

Or that PVT Pyle's killing of SGT Hartman was simply a crude manifestation of Freud's "(son) killing the father" archetype...

[78/84 guy]

A new review of a 25 year old movie is a little over the top !! I think if he started it today it would be different in many ways !! Still one of the best. The first 40 minutes are fantastic. Platoon is shit I think. Oliver at his worst !! Over acted and overblown !!

[Terry]

Perhaps I have to go back and re-watch this film 3-4 times to see what Kubrick was trying to say besides having a anti-war stance throughout most of the movie. Emery's rendition of Sgt Hartman was outstanding and for me he was the only memorable character (I loved and hated him at the same time) yet Kubrick has him killed... And I do think there were some racist overtones whether Kubrick purposefully put that there for a subtle dramatic effect only confused me more as I watched it. Like I said, I'll go back and re-watch it again and see if I have a different angle on the film.


As for the rest of the 'Nam films of the 80's 'Hamburger Hill' seemed to be the most realistic although you can tell it was shot with a small budget and forgettable actors.

You may well be right, or it just might be your take on the flick...maybe if I watched it again with your take in mind, I'd see the same things you did re: racist overtones.

FMJ is a bit schizophrenic, anyway. The basic training scenes ARE a bit more memorable than the second half of the film.

Even the best of the Vietnam films that came out from roughly 1977 to 1990 had bits about them that could have been left on the cutting room floor. I mean, even with many of those films being the result of some of the best director/actor/screenplay combinations cinema had to offer, in my book NONE of them come close to watching some of the better factual documentaries on Vietnam that contain raw footage of the real deal.

[Seshmeister]

What about Casualties of War with little Marty McFly?

Not exactly a laugh a minute but once you got past the casting it was a pretty harrowing film as I remember.

[Terry]

What about Casualties of War with little Marty McFly?

Not exactly a laugh a minute but once you got past the casting it was a pretty harrowing film as I remember.

Well, the thing of THAT one was I never COULD get past the casting of McFly...he just didn't quite have the chops to pull the role off, and his being in nearly every scene kind of emphasized that.

Bit of a shame, because DePalma has that incredible ability to set up those trademark panoramic shots of his, and it WAS a pretty harrowing story. I wouldn't say it was a bad film, but the combination of McFly and the film being released at the tail end of a decade + of Vietnam movies kind of left it one peg below Apocalypse Now and Platoon for me in terms of ranking order.

I mean, fuck, by the time Casualties was released I'd seen so many goddamn Vietnam movies that I was having 'Nam flaskbacks myself...and I'd never even been there, you know?

[Kristy]

I loved this scene:

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[Nitro Express]

My uncle served under Patton in the third army. He was a bad ass and had the knife a German prisoner pulled out of his jackboot and knifed him in the arm with. The German of course got bayonetted by my uncle. He also had a German Lugar. He said he saw Patton several times up front observing the situation. He was not the general who hid where it was safe. He told us some cool stories about the Battle of the Bulge. After Germany surrendered he was an MP and had Eisenhower pass through his checkpoint.

[Nitro Express]

Lee R. Ermy makes Full Metal Jacket. The movie would be boring as hell without those great boot camp scenes. I think Kubrick was having some fun with the movie more than trying to make any kind of statement. When they hit Vietnam it's all so cliche like the street whores going "fucky sucky, love you long time". Then you have the Tet Offensive in Hue. That's pretty much the movie.

The lesson of Vietnam is you don't win wars until a man with a rifle clean up the enemy on the ground and secures the country. Charlie was willing to lose more people than we were. Nixon and Kissinger thought they could bomb them into the stone age but they just dug in. Douglas McArther warned never to fight a land battle in Asia because it was impossible to win without using nukes. You don't win wars with bombs. We are learning this again. You will never have victory until and man with a rifle mops it up and we never mopped up Vietnam. We bombed the shit out of it, Cambodia, and Laos but never won because a man with a rifle couldn't mop it up.

[Nitro Express]

If you really want to know what Vietnam was about read The Iron Mountain Report. The US became a war economy after World War II and we needed to feed it. It's all in the report and war was determined to have many macro benefits to the United States.

[Seshmeister]

Which is so many other countries in the world see the US as a danger. To justify the US military economy threats and wars must be maintained or if need be, created.

Without the(hugely exaggerated) Russian threat something else had to be found.

[Diamondjimi]

Full Metal Jacket is my fav. Vietnam war movie. True, the first half is better and more memorable than the second half. But a great film nonetheless...

[Nitro Express]

Which is so many other countries in the world see the US as a danger. To justify the US military economy threats and wars must be maintained or if need be, created.

Without the(hugely exaggerated) Russian threat something else had to be found.

McNamera wanted a study done on a post war economy and a special think tank of various people was put together. They looked at using the military for peaceful humanitarian projects, they looked at space exploration but in the end they decided war was the most useful. It's all in The Iron Mountain Report.

Put it this way, my brother in law who works for a major military contractor just bought a bigger home. Business is good.

So yeah, whether people want to admit it or not the US is currently a war economy. Military hardware is our biggest product right now. We make some cars, some commercial aircraft and that's about it. We've outsourced everything else pretty much.

Basically the US is a broke superpower with the biggest military on the planet. We are using it currently to control the oil so we can blackmail the rest of the world into using our dollars.

[Nitro Express]

That being said, the US can mess with lesser powers but it can't mix it up with another nuclear superpower. Nobody wins so the cold war never ended. There are just more players and economic warfare is used more. Computer hacking is also part of this new war.

[Hardrock69]

If you really want to know what Vietnam was about read The Iron Mountain Report. The US became a war economy after World War II and we needed to feed it. It's all in the report and war was determined to have many macro benefits to the United States.

Another good book to read is called JFK by Colonel Fletcher Prouty. Sure 20% of it is about the JFK conspiracy, but 80% of the book is about how the CIA runs it's little third-world operations, most specifically, how Vietnam was a conflict CREATED by the CIA to begin with, to feed the Military Industrial Complex. The powers that be knew Vietnam was going to be one of our future Military Industrial projects by the late 40s. The certainly knew Korea was going to be the next area of conflict by the end of WWII.

[Hardrock69]

My uncle served under Patton in the third army. He was a bad ass and had the knife a German prisoner pulled out of his jackboot and knifed him in the arm with. The German of course got bayonetted by my uncle. He also had a German Lugar. He said he saw Patton several times up front observing the situation. He was not the general who hid where it was safe. He told us some cool stories about the Battle of the Bulge. After Germany surrendered he was an MP and had Eisenhower pass through his checkpoint.

Man that is fucking cool! If your uncle is still around, you need to set up a tripod with a video camera on it, give him a pint of some good sipping whiskey and a shot glass, roll the tape, and have him record all of his stories for posterity.

My best friend's Dad served with the Flying Tigers in China in WWII. One day he came over to our house, and he sat there and told us stories about his experiences for over an hour.

This is why I prefer to read autobiographies.....you get to hear the real story from those who were actually involved in areas of history, instead of some dry recounting of events by some scholar decades or centuries later.

Back in the 70s my Dad and I went to his hometown in Southern Arkansas. Visited one of our cousins, who by that time was in his 60s. He had the rifle of a Nazi sniper that he killed while in the European theater. It was an 8mm Mauser with swastikas stamped in the barrel, and a scope. He too had a Luger.