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| Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey, Arliss Howard |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Gunnery
Sergeant Hartman, Drill Instructor (R. Lee Ermey): I bet you're
the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have
the goddamned common courtesy to give him a reach-around.
The
intense training of a marine corps platoon followed by their experiences
in Vietnam.
 Easily
the movie with the most insulting drill officer ever, as played by R.
Lee Ermey: it elevates the first part of the movie onto a timeless pedestal
since language like that will never go out of style. Former US Marine
Corps drill instructor Lee Ermey left the army in 1969 after a rocket
explosion just north of
Da Nang riddled his arm and back with shrapnel. His post-war curriculum
started to include movie-work when he became the technical adviser on
Apocalypse Now. It did not take Ermey much time to convince Kubrick
that he was born for the part of FMJ's drill instructor. Moreover,
Ermey acquired the rare privilege to improvize on the set, a position
similar to Peter Sellers and Jack Nicholson, to whose "Mein Führer,
I can walk" and "Here's Johnny!" he added "I don't
like the name Lawrence. Lawrence is for faggots and sailors." According
to Kubrick-biographer Vincent LeBrutto, "Kubrick compiled a 250-page
transcript from Ermey's improvisations and inserted choices into the
screenplay."
The first part of the movie fits director Kubrick like a glove and it
may well be the closest he ever came to matching his artistic precision
with the same kind of effect in the script and on the screen. The implied
insanity and resulting implicit chaos is most vivid in the eyes of doomed
private Pyle. The second part of the movie never overcomes the big bang
of the first: the actual chaos of Vietnam feels much too staged in Kubrick's
hands and decidedly less frightening and believable because of it. This
part was not shot on location in South-East Asia (as other Vietnam movies
like The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Apocalypse Now
had been) but, as was the case with most of Kubrick's films, entirely
in Britain. For the final scenes with the sniper nest, set in the ruins
of a Imperial City of Hue, Kubrick selected an abanded coke-melting
plant in East London. Set designer Anton Furst had the job of a lifetime
when it was discovered that the area was in ruins and scheduled for
total demolition. Instead of having to build huge, expensive sets he
was now able to achieve his goal relatively cheaply by strategically
blowing up buildings and knocking holes with a wrecking ball. It looks
great and effective, but it's the ranting of R. Lee Ermey in the first
40 minutes that lingers in the mind much longer than any set design
Kubrick ever invented. |
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The
first DVD release of Full Metal Jacket was available separately or
as part of the original Region 1 release of the Stanley Kubrick Collection
box set, and featured a rather soft transfer drawn from damaged source
elements.
A remastered edition was released earlier this year for Region 1, again
both separately and as part of the newly remastered Stanley Kubrick
Collection box set, and features a cleaned-up transfer.
The Region 2 release of Full Metal Jacket features the remastered
version of the film, and is available both separately and as part of
the newly released Stanley Kubrick Collection box set. The Region 2
release, which is identical to the R1 version, served as basis for this
review.
Another instance of Kubrick's somewhat controversial choice of using the full-frame camera negative rather than the matted-down theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1, Full Metal Jacket is presented on DVD in a 1.33:1 ratio, revealing parts at the top and bottom of the screen that would have been masked off in theatrical projection. But unlike The Shining, for which Kubrick made the same choice with frankly unnatural-looking results, Full Metal Jacket actually looks quite good in this aspect ratio. I think it still would have been a welcome (and legitimate) choice to have offered both options on a single disc, but apparently Kubrick was quite explicit regarding this point, and there's no arguing with the Kubrick estate.
The new Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix isn't all that different from the
original mono soundtrack in the first half of the film, though it does
broaden the stage for the occasional bursts of music in the score. Dialogues
tend to sound occasionally shrill and mildly distorted due to the limited
dynamic range of the monaural source material. The second half benefits
most from the new sound design, with plentiful directional effects across
the front soundstage adding life and conviction to the semi-abstract
Viet Nam locations. Rear channel activity is kept to a bare minimum,
occasionally drawing explosions slightly into the rear, while adding
some depth to them with moderate use of the .1 LFE channel.
The
theatrical trailer is the only extra on this disc. The
static menu screens are presented in anamorphic widescreen and are accompanied
by a music cue from the score.
Gerard
Castelein & Dan Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on Full
Metal Jacket.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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