Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Where to Watch
- To accurately portray their role in Full Metal Jacket, Matthew Modine spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Stanley Kubrick.
- Full Metal Jacket utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Stanley Kubrick.
Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 British-American war film directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers. The film is divided into two distinct halves: the first follows a group of Marine recruits through the dehumanizing boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, under the terrifying Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by R. Lee Ermey; the second follows Private Joker, played by Matthew Modine, as a military journalist covering the Battle of Huรฉ during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
R. Lee Ermey, a former real-life Marine drill instructor, delivered one of the most unforgettable performances in war film history โ his relentless, inventively profane verbal abuse of the recruits was largely improvised, with Kubrick granting Ermey unprecedented freedom to ad-lib. The boot camp sequence culminated in the psychological destruction of Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, whose transformation from bumbling recruit to traumatized murderer provided the film's most devastating arc.
The Vietnam sequences were notable for being filmed entirely in England โ Kubrick, who refused to fly and hadn't left Britain in years, transformed a gas works in East London and palm-tree-lined areas of the Isle of Dogs into a convincing Huรฉ City. Full Metal Jacket earned $120 million worldwide and is considered one of the essential Vietnam War films alongside Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon.
