Fullmetal Jacket

Several Fridays ago (it took me waaay too long to actually finish this review), I watched Fullmetal Jacket, and then visited a friend’s room where they were watching Jarhead. I concluded that the latter movie could not have existed without the target audience’s inferred knowledge of the first. Unlike Caddyshack, this movie's humor was dark, and unlike Shawshank, this movie has no uplifting ending, and stays dark the whole way through. The story chronicles the experiences of Private Joker (Matthew Modine, who has been around but done nothing significant since), as he goes through boot camp and is then stationed in Vietnam. The movie is not really about Private Joker though, but he is the vehicle through which we must attempt to place real people amid the inhumanity of war.

Having watched both this movie and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in the same weekend, I was particularly aware of the role and treatment of women as sex objects in both films. Is Kubrick putting this subject matter in his films to make a point against the treatment of women in this sense, or simply because he's a misogynist? In Fullmetal, women are presented in an undignified sexual way from the get-go from "Mary Jane Rottencrotch" and the infamous Vietnamese prostitute who promises to "love you long time". Kubrick subverts this set up at the end of the movie, showing that the Vietnamese women are just as deadly as the men, which suggests Kubrick is not a woman-hater (I don't suppose I really thought he was, but it is interesting how he chooses to use the objectification and sexualization of women as a theme in Eyes Wide Shut as well).

I thought the movie was interesting, perhaps a bit too long, but definitely a movie you could sit through several times. As this movie came out in 1987, I think it's safe to say it wasn't the first film to examine the life of soldiers in the grit of battle. The film falls into the set of military commentary that does not make perfect heroes out of soldiers, and rather highlights their human fallibility and fragility. The generally laid-back and jocular attitudes of the young men, even once they are out of the base, is both alarming in the sense that they take their current situation so lightly, and understandable because if they took everything seriously they'd have a total meltdown. I think that Fullmetal Jacket follows suit with many movies (and other artistic works) that do not set out to criticize a specific war, but the ironies and pointlessness qualities of war in general.


Sorry it took so long to get this review up - I'm also trying to figure out what my next movie should be!