It's tough not to consider Full Metal Jacket two very separate movies- its tone, setting, and all characters but one change abruptly halfway through. The first half is the iconic journey of a set of recruits going through boot camp which doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Vietnam at all. There's really only three characters of importance here- everyman Matthew Modine who's just trying to get through boot camp like anyone else, his drill instructor R Lee Ermey (who gets all of the movie's best lines) and the dimwitted private Gomer Pyle, played by a very overweight Vinny D'onofrio (that guy from Criminal Intent). For about an hour or so we watch Pyle struggle to keep up with the rest of the recruits and Modine is assigned by Ermey to personally help him through. This half of the movie was fascinating; boot camp looks as hellish as ever and it all ends with a seriously tense stand-off. After the boot camp segment, the movie flashes forward a bit and picks up with the least interesting of the three characters of the first half now fighting in Vietnam. The tension is still there for the most part with exciting battle scenes, and the whole thing is beautifully shot, but none of the characters are all that interesting or sympathetic anymore so it's a bit harder to get invested in the story. What's especially telling to me is that I recognized tons of scenes and lines from the boot camp half of the movie as they've been referenced repeatedly in pop culture; the only line I had ever heard from the second half turned out to be a Vietnamese prostitute whose lines were used in 2 Live Crew's single "Me So Horny." Still though, even if only for the visuals I highly recommend the movie.
This is almost eerily identical to the takeaway I had a year and a half ago.
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Yeah, I've been sitting on this and a few other posts for a few weeks and I know at some point recently I saw your old post so there was definitely some influence. But it's just so clearly two separate movies- one an interesting character study with bland visuals, another a visual spectacle with a lacking story. Also I was thinking about Modine's character Joker in Vietnam, where he's made fun of for not having that thousand-yard stare as it's proof that he hasn't really seen combat as a reporter. The whole point of the time we spend with him is to watch as the horrors unfold around him until he finally experiences true trauma. But wait! What about the stand-off in the end of the boot camp segment? While it's hard to compare the two, surely that was pretty traumatic and would have serious psychological effects on him as well, right? When people are acting like he hasn't seen anything that serious, I'm pretty sure he just kinda laughs it off when clearly that moment would be weighing on his mind and he could easily tell people "yeah, I've seen some dark shit". Considering Joker's the only real link between the two stories, it felt like an odd spot to seem so inconsistent.
ReplyDeleteAlso your post is sorely lacking in 2 Live Crew references.
Great minds think alike. And so do we!
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