Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket and Platoon are clearly two of the biggest movies ever made about the

Vietnam War; therefore, they will always be compared and contrasted to each other.

Platoon was based on Oliver Stone’s own experience so he used simple war movie

techniques to give a realistic sense of what jungle warfare was like. Kubrick’s Full Metal

Jacket was based on Gustav Hasford’s experience, but Kubrick wanted to use the story to

explore what made people into killers. These two films take very different approaches

and if we are to compare them it should be in the capacity to understand what war means

to the average person.

Both of the films are very detailed in depicting what actual warfare is like; however,

Platoon gives a great sense of the environment: miserably hot, extremely intense, disease

filled, and a very scary environment no one would readily want to visit. Full Metal Jacket

explores this too, but focuses a lot attention on the process and training involved in

preparing for war.

These two films are a lot alike in two aspects: they both view the war pretty much

through the eyes of one soldier and they both seriously glorify war and make it

appear very glamorous. Both have strong male leads who it appears live in a strange

masculine realm where everyday rules do not necessarily apply to everyday people. This

concept is always appealing to males because even if they were never in combat they feel

as if they have “experienced” it. Both films explore the attitude of men wanting to and

even wishing for combat. They have the overwhelming desire to engage the enemy in a

battle to the death. Sadly this attitude usually ends in tragedy so the lesson here would be

be careful what you wish for.

A major difference between the two is in Platoon the soldiers are pretty much depicted as

brats who sit around and drink all day, do drugs, and even kill their superior officers. This

idea was touched on in Full Metal Jacket as well when a soldier, after “going crazy”, shot

and killed his senior drill sergeant; however, in Platoon this is more of a prominent

characteristic of the movie. In Platoon the main character is a rich college kid who

dropped out of college to perform his “duty” to his country, while Full Metal Jacket does

not portray anyone to be this smart or educated. That is if leaving school to go half way

around the world in a foreign land and get yourself shot at could be construed as smart.

Both films depict the harshness warfare has on one’s body and more importantly one’s

mind. They do however address this differently. In Full Metal Jacket we have the training

soldier who snaps and shoots his senior drill sergeant. There also is a scene where a

helicopter gunner is laughing and yelling as he guns down civilians working in a rice

patty, as well as the ending scene where a solider shots a Vietnamese sniper, who is just a

teenage girl, in the head. This is done without much said and an empty look in his eye so

as to detach himself from what he had just done. In Platoon American soldiers raid a

camp of Vietnamese and become so paranoid they begin to execute them in order to find

any