Word: kubrick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Stanley Kubrick' s first film in seven years, Full Metal Jacket, is a Viet Nam horror show with a dynamite first act and a fizzle finale...
With this splendid first 45 minutes of his new film, Stanley Kubrick reenters the real world. For a quarter-century the reclusive director has hit the cerebral fantasy button, in Pentagon war rooms (Dr. Strangelove), in outer and inner space (2001: A Space Odyssey), in the nightmare future (A Clockwork Orange), in the duplicitous past (Barry Lyndon) and down the endless bloody corridors of a deranged mind (The Shining). Now he's back. Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie...
...genius of Kubrick's work peaks in the second half of the film, as the new Marines are placed into several different platoons in Vietnam, just in time for the surprise Tet Offensive...
...Kubrick keeps the audience distanced from the action, inflicting on them the confusion that the soldiers themselves sense as he weaves them in and out of combat situation. But the confusion of the physical environment has entered the soldiers' souls, reflected best by one young recruit nicknamed Joker, who wears a peace symbol on his jacket while letters on his helmet boldly declare "Born to Kill...
...each character, and finally the audience, must cope with not only a desire for peace, but a lust for killing. What matters to Kubrick is the celebration of life, the soldiers' marvelling at their ability to kill or be killed...