Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick's study of men being turned into killing machines continues to puzzle people, partly because it seems to be two distinctly separate films.

First, the training sequence that looks like an instructional short, as the young Marines are stripped of their individual identities, until one of them cracks under pressure with bloody consequences.

Then comes an action movie illustrating warfare in Vietnam, and the ironic and terrifying way in which the rule book conflicts with the human heart.

Matthew Modine is the soldier whose cynicism is used by Kubrick to cover a huge range of conflicts, not all of them on the battlefield: the way, for example, that military vocabulary is used to give euphemistic cover to the unthinkable realities of slaughter, with 'collateral damage' referring to civilian casualties, and so on.

A complex masterpiece.

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