Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket
by Stanley Kubrick

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DVD Reviews of Full Metal Jacket

DVD Review: Great Movie; Not Sure What To Think Of The DVD ...
Summary: 3 Stars

But even "Charlie" doesn't seem to have much to do with the combat footage, which could have been set in any war. I also am not convinced that they are in Southeast Asia even with the palm trees Kubrick had planted to decorate his sets. The soldiers look too comfortable with their layers of clothing on, don't seem exhausted or scared enough, and it actually looks cold during the final shootout scenes. To a certain extent, I have always felt that Kubrick had sort of shot himself in the foot with various aspects of the movie, including the locations but most importantly by how uninteresting the narrative is once Joker gets in-country. There are some nice jabs at US military thinking and propaganda, but it's more like an echo of the preposterous situations from Dr Strangelove than any real new commentary from Kubrick. The American war in Vietnam was insane, barbaric, corrupt and cost lots of people their lives on both sides. Well, so what? What insight would Kubrick like us to take away from his movie, other than the fact that Joker is glad to be alive as the film ends? I'm glad to be alive every day ... you don't have to send me to war to figure that out.

Yet I do appreciate the movie for what it offers -- Adam Baldwin's Animal Mother is hilarious and scary at the same time, the scene in the helicopter with the nutzo door gunner bragging about 52 confirmed dead water buffallo is so over the top it is perfect, and one really does get the impression that anyone who has survived sustained combat emerges a changed person, no matter how rational they were beforehand.

My real puzzlement, though, comes from the "Stanley Kubrick Collection" DVD of the film, which he himself authorized to be presented in a full-screen format. The reason behind his decision is understandable, since the majority of home viewers seem to prefer the pan and scan full screen TV image, but I feel kind of cheated, and wish I had read more about just what I would be getting before shelling out the cash for it. I'm sure the trailers and other bonuses on the disc will delight "cultist" fans of the film, but frankly I wish I had saved myself ten bucks and just gotten a VHS tape. There is a special quality to watching a DVD film presented in widescreen format that I have never gotten from a VHS and kind of insist that any film I opt to invest in for DVD use be presented in a "letterboxed" format so I can see the movie in a form closest to what the director had intended.

So since it was Kubrick's own decision to chop and reformat the image, one has to kind of live with it I guess. Then again nobody ever said that great artists don't sometimes make bad decisions on how to present their work. Kubrick seems to have shot himself in his foot twice, and the result is a puzzled, disatisfied viewer who feels like someone decided I wasn't smart enough to understand what a widescreen presentation was. I'd give the movie four stars out of five, but that chopped screen image just [unprintable] me off.

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