Full Metal Jacket - Internet Research...

Stanley Kubrick excels in making movies that bring to light the absurdity of war. His Paths of Glory stands alongside All Quiet on the Western Front as not only one of the greatest films ever made about World War I, but one of the greatest anti-war films ever. Dr. Strangelove, obviously, holds every dearly held belief that war is a means of containing peace up to ridicule. Full Metal Jacket may be his most powerful indictment of the generally held consensus regarding war, however. It is a ferocious attack upon not necessarily the soldier per se, but rather the system that turns a good heart into a cold-blooded killer. Full Metal Jacket is a film easy to misunderstand because its prime rhetorical weapon is irony, but the irony is distanced from the black humor of Dr. Strangelove and so it is easy to confuse Kubrick's jokes on the military with admiration. This often incredibly subtle irony culminates with the imagery of those painfully young men who have just come from slaughtering an even more painfully young woman sniper singing a nostalgic song from a Walt Disney television show. War turns everything into a battleground where murder can be justified and forgiven, and the most psychotic of behavior is rewarded with medals and ribbons. In the concluding scene of Full Metal Jacket Stanley Kubrick startles us with the fact that war is really nothing more than a playground game played with real weapons instead of toy guns. Many critics and moviegoers are resistant to the second half of Full Metal Jacket primarily because Kubrick dares to follow through on the thesis he sets up with the admittedly more entertaining boot camp sequences: denying the conventional wisdom that combat is a place where men are trained to defend their country in the name of compassion and civilization.