Cory Tice:Full Metal Jacket

I just recently watched Full Metal Jacket and my heart has never beat so fast during a movie. Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of the Vietnam War, and not only the war but the training process as well, is very straight foward and graphic. I think he chooses not to sugar coat anything for the audience to show how the process from new cadet to soldier on the Vietnam combat field can literally warp a person and their mentality completely. The people that go in to the camp, survive, and come home from war are not the same person that were before. I really enjoyed, and was very movied, at how the director chose to exaggerate the blood from any wound by slowing the shot down to make it more graphic and heart felt, making the red a much more vibrant red than blood really is, and used more of it than I think really needed to be used to get the point across. But, he did this for a reason. I think he wanted to give people a cruel depiction of death, and not just any death, but a soldiers death in the Vietnam War. This movie really terrified me me. I began watching it by being amazed at how the Drill Leader introduced the new cadets into the core due to his graphic choice of words that he individually spoke to each cadet rather than as a whole. He established his credibility of being in charge with no contestation at a very earlier stage, which did make me laugh. But, as the movie progressed my smiles turned to shocked expressions, which then turned to grimmaces. I started with the mentality that this was a movie, and through the directors choices and dialouge spoken by the actor I ended my experience believing that; this is real; these things did happen; these soldiers did die.