Film
Full Metal Jacket
- Director
- Stanley Kubrick
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 116 mins
Still the only ‘nam flick to have been shot on location in the London Docklands, Stanley Kubrick‘s belated 1987 follow-up to The Shining revolves loosely around the ambiguous character of Private Joker (Matthew Modine) and falls into two quite distinct halves. In the first, Joker and his fellow US Marine recruits are brutalised and shorn of innocence by foul-mouthed drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey. In the second, he ends up in Vietnam as a reporter for an army newspaper and covers the fight for Huế following the Tet offensive.
The best of the late ’80s crop of ‘nam flicks, Full Metal Jacket refuses to resort to the usual cinematic artifices to explore the futility of war, preferring to slowly unfold its logic and expose its moral dilemmas. It’s back on screen in the Everyman’s Saturday late night season of cult classics.
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