Full Metal Jacket

It's admirable what Stanley Kubrick tries to do in Full Metal Jacket. The first half is a pronoucement of the horrors of war we come to expect with Kubrick fufilling the idea of boot camp being as rigorous as possible. The simple soldier, Joker, is supposebly "born to kill" afterwards. His experience in Vietnam shows he isn't ready. It shows it takes a lot more than boot camp to unconnect the nerves that keep us from killing. Kubrick paints the life a soldier in Vietnam to go against expectation. It's filled with a lot of down time and the talk of heroics instead of being shown it. Joker finally gets his brush with combat when his company is assigned to take out a sniper. The sniper turns out to be a woman and Joker has to shoot her straight on and watch her die. The experience humbles Joker to realize how tough it is to kill. The theoretical nature of Joker's experience into Vietnam is provoking, but Kubrick's art is too readable and artificial. Every portion of the story is aimed at one conceptual idea. It starts to reduce the scenes to have little significance. Also Kubrick's theoretical idea is too slim. The nature of killing has been brandied about in numerous works. The only difference is that the subject is about Vietnam. Kubrick distinguishes the place of war with just a few scenes of television cameras following the soldiers. There isn't enough depth into the situation of Vietnam or in the ideas Kubrick is interested in. When this was released, the only notable fictional films made about Vietnam was Apocalypse Now and Go Tell the Spartans! Platoon arrived at the same time, but wasn't around long enough to influence Kubrick to take the realities more serious. The other two films were either generic or fantastic.