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 received positive reviews from critics. 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 United States Marine Corps recruits arrive for eight weeks of Recruit Training at Parris Island, where 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 dimwitted Leonard Lawrence, whom Hartman nicknames "Gomer Pyle".
During bootcamp, Pyle struggles to meet Hartman's expectations and is eventually paired with Joker. Pyle shows signs of improvement, but during an inspection, Hartman discovers a jelly doughnut in Pyle's footlocker. Believing the platoon has failed to improve Pyle, Hartman begins a policy of collective punishment in which he will punish everyone except for Pyle for each mistake he makes. 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, showing particular expertise in marksmanship. This impresses Hartman but worries Joker, who believes Pyle may be suffering a mental breakdown after seeing Pyle talk to his rifle.
The night before the new Marines are to leave Parris Island, Joker, on fire watch, 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, but Pyle fatally shoots Hartman and then kills himself in front of Joker.
By late January of 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".
During the Battle of Huế, platoon leader Lieutenant "'Mr. Touchdown'" Schinoski is killed, leading Sergeant "Crazy Earl" to take his place as squad leader. As they enter the city, the squad engages in combat with enemy forces and secure the area. Later, during a patrol, 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 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 (later Sergeant) 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 (credited as "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 (later Sergeant) "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 (voice only, uncredited), whom Cowboy communicates with by radio
Themes
thumb|upright 0.7|Helmet prop from the film
Michael Pursell's essay "Full Metal Jacket: The Unravelling of Patriarchy" (1988) 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."
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'."
Production
Development
In early 1980, Stanley Kubrick contacted Michael Herr, author of the Vietnam War memoir Dispatches (1977), to discuss work on a film about the Holocaust but Kubrick discarded that idea in favor of a film about the Vietnam War. Herr and Kubrick met in England; Kubrick told Herr he wanted to make a war film but had yet to find a story to adapt. Kubrick discovered Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (1979) while reading the Kirkus Review. Herr received the novel in bound galleys and thought it a masterpiece. Kubrick had already written a detailed treatment of the novel, Ermey asked Kubrick if he could audition for the role of Hartman. Kubrick, who had seen Ermey's portrayal of drill instructor Staff Sergeant Loyce in The Boys in Company C (1978), told Ermey that he was not vicious enough to play the character. Ermey improvised insulting dialogue against a group of Royal Marines who were being considered for the part of background Marines in order to demonstrate his ability to play the character and to show how a drill instructor attacks individuality in new recruits.
Nine months of negotiations to cast Anthony Michael Hall as Private Joker were unsuccessful; Hall would later regret not doing the film. Val Kilmer was also considered for the role, and Bruce Willis declined a role because of commitments to his television series Moonlighting. Robert De Niro was also considered for the role, although Kubrick eventually felt that the audience would "feel cheated" if De Niro's character were killed in the first hour. Bill McKinney was also considered for the part, but Kubrick professed an irrational fear of the actor. Denzel Washington showed interest in the film, but Kubrick did not send him a script.
Filming
Principal photography began on August 27, 1985, and concluded on August 8, 1986. Scenes were filmed in Cambridgeshire, the Norfolk Broads, in eastern London at Millennium Mills and Beckton Gas Works in Newham and on the Isle of Dogs. Kubrick hired Anton Furst as the production designer, impressed by his work on The Company of Wolves (1984). Bassingbourn Barracks, a former Royal Air Force station and then a British Army base, was used as the Parris Island Marines boot camp. and along the River Thames. Locations were decorated with 200 palm trees imported from Spain Westland Wessex helicopters, which have a much longer and less-rounded nose than that of the Vietnam era H-34, were painted Marines green to represent Sikorsky H-34 Choctaw helicopters. Kubrick obtained a selection of rifles, M79 grenade launchers and M60 machine guns from a licensed weapons dealer. During the boot camp sequence of the film, Modine and the other recruits underwent Marine Corps training, during which Ermey yelled at them for 10 hours a day while filming the Parris Island scenes. To ensure that the actors' reactions to Ermey's lines were as authentic and fresh as possible, Ermey and the recruits did not rehearse together. He also nearly fought with D'Onofrio during filming the boot camp scenes after he taunted D'Onofrio while laughing with the film's extras between takes.
During filming, Ermey was injured in a car crash and broke several ribs, leaving him unavailable for four and a half months.
During Cowboy's death scene, a building that resembles the alien monolith in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is visible. Kubrick described this as an "extraordinary accident".
Music
Vivian Kubrick, under the alias Abigail Mead, wrote the film's score. According to an interview in the January 1988 issue of Keyboard, the film was scored mostly with a Series III edition Fairlight CMI synthesizer and a Synclavier. For the period music, Kubrick reviewed Billboard list of the top 100 hits for each year from 1962 to 1968, considering many songs but he found that "sometimes the dynamic range of the music was too great, and we couldn't work in dialogue."
Box office
During its opening weekend, it accrued $2.2 million, an average of $10,313 per theater, ranking it the number 10 film for the weekend June 26–28.
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The 2020 4K UHD release uses a new HDR remastered native 2160p that was transferred from the original 35mm negative, which was supervised by Kubrick's personal assistant Leon Vitali. It contains the remixed audio and, for the first time since the original DVD release, the theatrical mono mix. The release was a critical success; publications praised its image and audio quality, calling the former exceptionally good and faithful to the original theatrical release, and Kubrick's vision while noting the lack of new extras and bonus content. A collector's edition box set of this 4K UHD version was released with different cover art, a replica theatrical poster of the film, a letter from director Stanley Kubrick, and a booklet about the film's production among other extras.
Reception
Critical reception
thumb|[[R. Lee Ermey (pictured) was praised by critics for his performance as Hartman, leading him to win the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor.]]
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively collected reviews to give the film a score of 90% based on reviews from 87 critics and an average rating of 8.3/10. The summary states; "Intense, tightly constructed, and darkly comic at times, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket may not boast the most original of themes, but it is exceedingly effective at communicating them." Time Out London disliked the film, saying: "Kubrick's direction is as steely cold and manipulative as the régime it depicts," and that the characters are underdeveloped, adding "we never really get to know, let alone care about, the hapless recruits on view".
British television channel Channel 4 voted Full Metal Jacket fifth on its list of the greatest war films ever made. The film is ranked 95 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Thrills list, which was published in 2001.
Accolades
Between 1987 and 1989, Full Metal Jacket was nominated for eleven awards, including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and was sampled by rap artists 2 Live Crew in their 1989 hit "Me So Horny" and by Sir Mix-A-Lot in "Baby Got Back" (1992).
See also
- Paths of Glory
- List of Vietnam War films
Notes
References
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