Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick; US, 1987)

War was no stranger. Kubrick had already attacked that front in Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, and even Dr. Strangelove. But the Vietnam War was different. It was a war run like a business with a PR firm on retainer. Ideology was a thing of the past—no great banner of justice waved in the winds of this war. Kubrick begins on Parris Island, home to the Marine Corps boot camp, singling out a platoon of young GIs, little more than unsullied ore for the smelter of combat. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the drill instructor played by real-deal Lee Ermey, is an unrelenting brute whose sole task is to make his wards kill-ready. Assigned glib names by Gunny, the recruits—sharp-witted Joker (Matthew Modine), rustic Cowboy (Arliss Howard), and doltish Gomer Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio)—are systematically bullied into becoming retooled warriors, relying on militarized allegiances that value virility, camaraderie, and a jocular misogyny. Properly processed, these anxious killing machines find themselves in Da Nang in 1968, just as the Tet Offensive surges across the paddies. In Full Metal Jacket, glory and patriotism are the first to fall. Without a motivating creed, the combatants don’t understand why they fight, just that they do. And in a series of brilliantly executed firefights staged with disorienting cool, the grunts take one casualty after another. A correspondent for Stars and Stripes, Joker is the film’s overarching observer, an ironic, bitter witness who has yet to cultivate his “thousand-yard stare,” the blank gaze of a war-weary soldier. In Kubrick’s next film, those eyes would be shut.

• Written by Kubrick, Gustav Hasford, Michael Herr, based on Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers. Photographed by Douglas Milsome. With Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey. (116 mins, Color, DCP, From Warner Bros.)