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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 1624
Released: May 15, 2007 |
| Our Price: $6.95 |
| Used Price: $6.79 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
The story of an 18-year-old marine recruit named Private Joker - from his carnage-and-machismo boot camp to his climactic involvement in the heavy fighting in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
Description of Full Metal Jacket:
Stanley Kubrick's 1987, penultimate film seemed to a lot of people to be contrived and out of touch with the '80s vogue for such intensely realistic portrayals of the Vietnam War as Platoon and The Deer Hunter. Certainly, Kubrick gave audiences plenty of reason to wonder why he made the film at all: essentially a two-part drama that begins on a Parris Island boot camp for rookie Marines and abruptly switches to Vietnam (actually shot on sound stages and locations near London), Full Metal Jacket comes across as a series of self-contained chapters in a story whose logical and thematic development is oblique at best. Then again, much the same was said about Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a masterwork both enthralled with and satiric about the future's role in the unfinished business of human evolution. In a way, Full Metal Jacket is the wholly grim counterpart of 2001. While the latter is a truly 1960s film, both wide-eyed and wary, about the intertwining of progress and isolation (ending in our redemption, finally, by death), Full Metal Jacket is a cynical, Reagan-era view of the 1960s' hunger for experience and consciousness that fulfilled itself in violence. Lee Ermey made film history as the Marine drill instructor whose ritualized debasement of men in the name of tribal uniformity creates its darkest angel in a murderous half-wit (Vincent D'Onofrio). Matthew Modine gives a smart and savvy performance as Private Joker, the clowning, military journalist who yearns to get away from the propaganda machine and know firsthand the horrific revelation of the front line. In Full Metal Jacket, depravity and fulfillment go hand in hand, and it's no wonder Kubrick kept his steely distance from the material to make the point. --Tom Keogh
Full Metal Jacket Reviews:
One of the greatest war movies of all time! 
2009-12-23 - Although this film has a bit of independent movie flavor, it still ranks as one of the best. Showing both the humorous and distasteful side of the Vietnam conflict I highly recommend it for those who enjoy dramatic and suspenseful themes. It is an altogether dark film, with flashes of hope here and there, and ends with the message that the soldier can be many things yet at the end of the day just wants to be alive. This is not a movie for young people, as it contains scenes of very graphic violence, but this is the realism of war that makes it great. It well captures the individual personalities that represent the men who fought in this conflict.
"You're fresh out of friends!" Vietnam don't mean a thing 
2009-09-08 - I first saw the movie Full Metal Jacket back when I was a teenager. Just recently I finished reading The Short Timers (which the movie was based on and long since out of print) by the late Gustav Hasford, whose just due as writer I feel is wrongly held from him. My favorite genre of war films are the ones about the Vietnam era. This includes this film, Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill, and so on. Stanley Kubrick (God rest his soul) in my opinion delivered in telling his view on war from a humanistic standpoint. The point Kubrick was trying to make was war is a natural order of things, but whatever cause one claims to fight for, violence will not serve any purpose. What is the purpose of going to combat if not to win but only to lose friends, and debating on whether one is a journalist or a stone-cold killer? The central theme here is man's duality when it comes to the theater of combat. This is best shown through Matthew Modine's character James Davis, a.k.a. Joker, who initially goes through boot camp on Parris Island. He gives us insight on how the individuality of a recruit is demolished, and rebuilt into a hard-nosed Marine or Soldier. The casualty of this ritual of boot camp is the hapless Leonard Lawrence, a.k.a. Pvt Pyle (Leonard Pratt in the book), played well by Vincent D'Onofrio, who is the hapless recruit continually taunted and scorned by the reasonably tough but brutal and sadistic drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann (Gerheim in the book), played brilliantly by R. Lee Ermey (who in reality was a former Marine D.I.), as well as his fellow recruits because of his mistakes. Eventually, Pvt Pyle "hacks it" physically, but all is not right upstairs because of the physical and psychological abuse internalized, and one will find out the tragic conclusion at the end of the boot camp half of the film.
The second half of the film gets into the battle. We are in a world of [...], as some characters in the film would say. Some of the reviews I read cite this as being the least favorite part of the film because it drags on and did not have as much life as in the first half. Well war is not supposed to have life, and everything is abysmal and destroyed. Whatever preconceived notion that war is like a movie and one dies like a hero instantly goes out the window that was the feeling Kubrick wanted us to experience. By this time, Joker has become a hippie in uniform, and if we look deep into it enough, we can envision a profound sense of disillusionment within his character. The paradox there is even more defined by the peace button on his helmet and "BORN TO KILL" written on it, which is the question he will have to ponder later on.
In my opinion, those of us who only see Full Metal Jacket as a film just about a group of Marines in Vietnam or the Marine Corps culture in general (alluding to the boot camp part) is missing the point. It is a war film that was inherently antiwar(though Stanley Kubrick states that it was not his purpose)and no matter which branch of the service you are in as in grunt, be it the Army or Marines, everybody who was in the military at that time went through the same deal. Also one has to understand and appreciate the author, who was a former Marine who protested the war while in uniform, and decided to convey his experiences as a journalist through his novel. Mr. Hasford was addressing what he saw as the problems in the military culture back in his era; despite the apparent fact that armed forces were changing, it still was not very progressive socially. R. Lee Ermey's character of D.I. Hartmann or Gerheim, whichever you choose, though his character says he doesn't look down on anybody, was the enbodiment of the the old guard in the military. You know, the types that are reactionary and bigoted (which can attest to the misogyny, homophobia and to some degree racism towards minorities in the service, as well as the perceived enemy, the Vietnamese). It also shows that in order to survive combat, one must learn to devalue one's own humanity and turn yourself into a thing, and learn not to see the humanity in what one believes to be the enemy.
Of course this is one best films I have seen about Vietnam. If one wishes to get further insight of the character of James "Joker" Davis, I recommend you read The Short-Timers and the follow up to that, The Phantom Blooper.
It is an incredible movie.
2009-08-14 - full metal jacket is an incredible movie, it will take you to a really good time watching it.
Well made, but preachy and overrated. 
2009-07-19 - Having grown up in the shadow of the Vietnam war (long story), I spent a lot of my youth watching Vietnam War films as they began coming out. I've read no small amount of books on the Vietnam war over the past couple of decades, from grunt perspectives to historians, to journalists. I have a mixed opinion on the war itself. It's a complicated war and a complicated subject. Full Metal Jacket is certainly well made, and well acted. I'm not going to go into detail about the pro's and con's or the jarring transition between boot camp and being in the bush. The first half of the film makes its points about training, the military, etc., all fairly heavy handedly, but its one point of view. By the time they reach the second half of the film, the story is so fanciful and so heavy handed that preachy views are constantly bombarding the viewer through one means or another. Sure, there are realistic moments, realistic portrayals of characters who don't have their head on too straight, but the movie just runs things into the ground with a very anti- everything point of view. By the end of the movie, one has viewed what is one of the most stupid and most disrespectful views of service men and the military I have ever seen on film. Ultimately, it reveals that the makers of the film certainly were not terribly knowledgeable about their subject, and it comes off as preachy. It's like listening to a young college student who has read a couple books whine and moan while they show their abundant lack of insight.
Good picture but be careful
2009-07-17 - I like this movie but as a "former serving Marine"I have a prejudice in this direction and I can fill in some of the things Stanley Kubrick missed or blew by.Except for the broadly played Colonel that chews out Pvt.Joker (Matthew Modine)as the Marines are entering Hue, the cast is very good and Lee Ermey as a former D.I. himself,is outstanding as Sgt.Hartman.This movie definitely deserves the R rating it has.I enjoyed this picture a lot but some Marine buddies I know hate it! You will have to make up your own mind.
