1987 war, dir. Stanley Kubrick, Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey:
IMDb /
allmovie. Boot camp is hell,
then it gets worse.
But it's boot camp, the first 45-odd minutes of this 116-minute
film, that's the memorable part, at least for me. It's the most
effective filmic depiction I've seen of the way individuality must be
erased in order to produce military brotherhood (indeed, in order to
produce people who can both kill and stop killing without breaking);
it doesn't matter how you give in to the system, it just matters
that you do, and once you've made that first compromise they've got
you. (Nobody down at this level could articulate this as the
brainwashing that it obviously is, of course.) And of course this was
the start of major parts for R. Lee Ermey, all too often doing some
imitation of his role here.
And then things go… slack, as all these people who've been through
boot camp suddenly start to act like normal on-screen soldiers; and
one feels they shouldn't be able to do that any more, at least not
while they're still inside the system. Then it's off to Beckton
Gasworks for the fighting, and while city fights aren't part of the
Vietnam cliché, they're staged effectively; perhaps it's unreasonable
of me to complain that it's too clear what's happening where, after
I complained about the opposite in Platoon, but I do think there may
be a happy medium, to make it clear that this is more scary and
confusing than a paintball session but at the same time let the
untrained viewer remain aware of what's going on.
A note on Adam Baldwin; I hadn't seen this when I watched Firefly,
but now I can't help thinking that his role there now seems awfully
like his role here fifteen years earlier.
If like me you've seen a lot of photographs of Bassingbourn Barracks,
several outdoor scenes will look awfully familiar. Stranger to me,
though justified, is the use of Westland Wessex helicopters; they're
not bad visual substitutes for H-34 Choctaws, and of course the USMC
was using Choctaws rather than the Hueys that are the Vietnam-cliché
helicopter, but it's still a moment of disconnection for my inner
aviation buff.
With a different second and third act this could have been superb. As
it is, after a stunning start, most of it ends up feeling like a
let-down.
As usual if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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