Two great flicks

These really are good movies, it just sucks that they're under one roof. If Full Metal Jacket was somehow a two-part film, it would be a masterpiece. Now after about 50 minutes we cut from one great film to another great film, with no common theme or development. It's obvious that the focus of the training segment is Pyle, even if Joker is the main character. The loss of this focus when the war segment begins hurts the film in the way that it then has to create another focus for us. This makes this break in the structure a very obvious and painful one. It feels as if someone would reboot the entire movie in the middle of the proverbial action. Make no mistake however; from the fantastic over-the-top performance from Lee R. Ermey to the often absent, but yet powerful score, Kubrick's Vietnam-epic is definately worth watching once, twice, three times... It will always give something more to you as you notice something different about the characters, performances or events depicted on the screen. There's always something going on in the background, figures endlessly shifting through the stark, murky clouds of Vietnamese landscape and those long, long corridors of the training island.

9/10