Full Metal Jacket

1987

In North Carolina, during the Vietnam war, future Marines are the responsibility of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey), with insults and humiliations part of the intensive training. Amongst the recruits are Joker (Matthew Modine), Cowboy (Arliss Howard) and Gomer Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio), Hartman's whipping boy, also nicknamed Whale. Pyle gradually loses his mind, kills the sergeant and commits suicide.

In Vietnam, Joker, who has become an army journalist, is sent to the battlefield, where he runs into Cowboy. Their section is caught under the fire of a sniper, a young Vietcong woman who, after being wounded by the soldiers, begs Joker to kill her.

Whereas he had not filmed in seven years, Kubrick adapted The Short-Timers in collaboration with its author, Gustav Hasford, and Michael Herr, co-script writer of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). The shooting lasted more than a year at Pinewood Studios in London.

The film came out in the United States on 26 June 1987 and in France on 21 October of the same year. In both countries, the critics gave Full Metal Jacket a favourable reception, even though certain American journalists reproached Kubrick for choosing a topic that had already been dealt with numerous times. Jack Kroll succinctly summed up a common impression: "What this film quite often gives us is an impression of déjà-vu [...]. But this living portrait of a double Hell on earth nonetheless packs considerable force [...]" (1)