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Aka: Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket
A two-segment look at the effect of the military mindset and war itself on Vietnam era Marines. The first half follows a group of recruits in basic training under the command of the punishing Sgt. Hartman. The second half shows one of those recruits, Joker, covering the war as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, focusing on the Tet offensive.
In this riveting look at military life during the Vietnam conflict, Stanley Kubrick, who made the powerful antiwar classics PATHS OF GLORY (WWI) and DR. STRANGELOVE (the Cold War), once again explores the behavior of men in battle. FULL METAL JACKET (1987), adapted from Gustav Hasford's novel THE SHORT TIMERS, is broken down into two very different parts. The first half of the film focuses on the training of a squad of Marine grunts on Parris Island, and more specifically on the troubled relationship between the brutal drill sergeant (a frightening Lee Ermey) and an oafish misfit (a brilliant Vincent D'Onofrio) w...
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ho just happens to be a sharpshooter. The second half takes the grunts to Hue City, where the climactic battle of the 1968 Tet Offensive--and the turning point of the Vietnam War--took place. The story is told through the eyes of Private Joker (Matthew Modine), a cynical aspiring photojournalist who is forced to fight for his life and the lives of his fellow recruits.
Unusually for Kubrick, FULL METAL JACKET emerged at a time when a trend for films about Vietnam was in full swing. PLATOON had proceeded Kubrick's film by a year, and lesser efforts such as HAMBURGER HILL also emerged in 1987. London's abandoned docklands may not be the most obvious choice of location to replicate the ravages of the Vietnam landscape, but this is where Kubrick shot the film, sticking to his dogged principles of not shooting outside his adopted home. A moving commentary on the dehumanizing process that occurs when soldiers prepare and engage in battle, FULL METAL JACKET is an unforgettable experience from one of the most original voices to ever pick up a movie camera.
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Stanley Kubrick's return to filmmaking after a seven-year hiatus, this film crystallizes the experience of the Vietnam War by concentrating on a group of raw Marine volunteers. Based on Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers, the film's first half details the volunteers' harrowing boot-camp training under the profane, power-saw guidance of drill instructor Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey, a real-life drill instructor whose performance is one of the most terrifyingly realistic on record). Part two takes place in Nam, as seen through the eyes of the now thoroughly indoctrinated marines. Ironically, Full Metal Jacket wa...
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s filmed almost entirely in England.
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Het eerste deel van de film volgt een groep militairen die door Sgt. Hartman op onmenselijke wijze klaargestoomd worden voor de Vietnam oorlog. Het tweede deel van de film laat zien hoe één van deze militairen, Joker, de oorlog verslaat als reporter, tijdens het Tet-offensief.
Full Metal Jacket News Articles
Steven Spielberg 's equine epic may help dispel the acquiescence in warfare to which his own films contributed Steven Spielberg has done his bit to shape western attitudes to warfare. Saving Private Ryan burnished the myth of heroic conflict when cinema had lost faith in it. Schindler's List re-established the useful notion of the indisputably evil foe. In the films of the 40s and 50s, our boys socked it to the Nazis time and again to audiences' innocent delight. However, Vietnam swept away the simplicities of battlefield bravado. When Hollywood got round to confronting that ill-fated undertaking, it found little to glorify. Instead it homed in on the horror, the horror.Films like Apocalypse Now , Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War fed public disgust with militarism. America, it was said, would never again put boots on the ground in conflict, but would turn its back on foreign entanglements as its founders had intended.
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