“Full Metal Jacket” by Annabel

Some of the Cold War outcomes

To spice up the last blog post, I decided to add a video showing some of the outcomes and inventions that happened during the Cold War. As we know, Cold War brought huge developments in many different areas of life and not just military equipment was advancing. This video brings out a few different sides of the development and the aftermath of it all. Looking back at the Cold War, it could have ended a lot differently for the world and a global war was not that far away. We can be thankful that WW III didn´t start and every story has two sides. This video shows a bit of the good and a bit of the bad from the Americas perspective. For me, the visual consisted of facts that I wasn´t familiar with before and hopefully you wil learn something new from it as well.

The Review

“Full Metal Jacket” was definitely the most intriguing film I have ever watched. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it and quite frankly still have not figured out if I enjoyed “Full Metal Jacket” or not. Nevertheless, it is possibly on of the most historically accurate fictional war films ever made. Taking these two aspects into consideration, we can begin our reponce.

To kick us off with, I will discuss over Private Pyle and his actions:

“My mother is a psychiatrist in the Veterans Administration. I showed her the first part of the movie and asked her if the portrayal of a person like Private Pyle snapping like he did in the movie was realistic. She said yes, and that the condition was called psychosis, and it is induced by stress.”
Link to the review: http://full_metal_jacket_25.tripod.com/ha1.html

I must admit, I was really unsure about the portrayal on Private Pyle and if it was maybe overdramatized to make the film more entertaining and interesting. So I decided to look into this and it came out that I was partially wrong. Psychosis was more common amongst the soldiers then I could´ve imagined. Trainig on the Parris Island was exactly like the film depicted and as we all saw it was brutal. Some just could not handle it but showing it or asking for help would have made the Private a weak man so most of those cases did end with the men killing themselves. To make the film a bit more dramatic, they did make Private Pyle also kill their commander, there really isn´t any sources about how many privates with mental illnesses killed their supervisors so we can conclude that the particular incident we saw in “Full Metal Jacket” wasn´t common but could have still happened.

Secondly, I will talk a bit more about why I am so confused about the film:

“Kubrick seems to want to tell us the story of individual characters, to show how the war affected them, but it has been so long since he allowed spontaneous human nature into his films that he no longer knows how. After the departure of his two most memorable characters, the sergeant and the tubby kid, he is left with no characters (or actors) that we really care much about. And in a key scene at the end, when a marine feels joy after finally killing someone, the payoff is diminished because we don’t give a damn about the character.”
Link to the review: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/full-metal-jacket-1987

This review actually helped me understand why I was so conflicted about this film. The first half when we see the marines in training is quite interesting and gives us a lot of material, at certain points you feel sad and two scenes later are crying with laughter but after that, I agree with the statement I brought out. Jokers´ character has no development what so ever. We see him in the beginning being brave and cracking jokes and he is still pretty much the same by the end of the film. That is way I really did not care about the ending. In my opinion, the stand-off between Private Pyle and the sergeant was a really dynamical dialogue and carried the first half of “Full Metal Jacket”. So the other half almost felt out of place and nothing but the fact that Joker and Cowboy where in the first part really tied the two sections together for me.

To conclude, I didn´t enjoy this film and the more I think about it, the less I like it. I felt like something was off throughout the whole film and even though a lot of people rave about it, it didn´t give me such a great impression. I would still recommend others to watch it and then I definitely want to have a discussion about it and how did they feel about it, honestly it is intriguing to listen how differently it is possible to understand the way “Full Metal Jacket” is put together and I am interested if I am the only one who finds it weird.

Links used for the review: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/kcmhr/publications/assetfiles/historical/Wessely2004-lessonsofvietnam.pdf
https://taskandpurpose.com/10-things-probably-never-knew-full-metal-jacket