Actually, Full Metal Jacket consists of two different movies – the first of which follows a company of new recruits through 12 grueling weeks of the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carlonia. The outstanding performance of R. Lee Ermey, playing Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, gives insight into the hell young recruits and draftees must go through to graduate boot camp. Young men barely out of high school, and full of youthful humor and ambition, are steadily molded into well-disciplined killing machines and the world’s greatest fighters. Meanwhile, one of the recruits – a clumsy, overweight Private Pyle – struggles with the strict regiment and Marine life in general, until his fellow recruits force him back in line. This unleashes the inner beast within Pyle…with tragic consequences.

The second part of the film follows a platoon’s experiences in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Here Kubrick focuses on the ugly side of America’s experience in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s, through the prism of the young men sent their to fight it. The Marines quickly realize that their government has sent them into a no-win situation, public support for the war has eroded, and even the native Vietnamese see the Americans as more burden than ally. Kubrick captures the essence of the nihilism of war through Private Joker, a reporter for the Marine Corps’ Stars and Stripes newsletter. Once a jovial character who made light of the situation he found himself in, Joker is reduced to an emotionless, battle-hardened warrior by the film’s conclusion. War is hell.