Retrospective Film Review

Full Metal Jacket (1987) • 35 Years Later — Kubrick’s classic on the dehumanisation of war

A group of US Marine recruits go through basic training before being sent to Vietnam.

Perfectionist as always and unable to risk anything slipping out of control, Stanley Kubrick recreated for Full Metal Jacket a South Carolina military training facility in the fields of Cambridgeshire, England, and the Vietnamese city of Hue in an abandoned London gasworks complete with 100,000 plastic plants. It’s fitting, then, that one of the few things in Full Metal Jacket that’s almost real — the character of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by the ex-US Marine instructor R Lee Ermey, hired only as a technical consultant before yelling his way into the role — comes so close to destroying the film.

Not “destroying” in an entirely bad way, though. Hartman, the training sequences he dominates, and his relentless persecution of Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio), are the most attention-grabbing things in Full Metal Jacket, and the pair are certainly the most interesting characters and the…