Full Metal Jacket

After a seven-year absence, the longest break between films so far in his career, Kubrick returned to theaters with his third and final war film. Set in the notorious boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina and, subsequently, throughout Vietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive, Full Metal Jacket was in fact shot entirely in England, in part at a dilapidated gas works on the banks of the Thames. As seen through the eyes of Private Joker (Matthew Modine) and accented by Kubrick’s attention to emotionally sterile environments, sparse dialogue and striking visual symmetries, Full Metal Jacket traces the grunts’ journey from humiliation and fatigue of base training under the verbal abuse of Drill Sergeant Hartman (F. Lee Ermey) to the chaos amid the magic hour-lit rubble of Hue, a Vietnamese city decimated by combat. As he did thirty years earlier with Paths of Glory, Kubrick exposes the cruel absurdities of war. The film’s ironic coda, which has the soldiers marching through fiery wreckage during nightfall and chanting the Mickey Mouse Club theme, telegraphs the Kubrick’s belief that in Vietnam, as in life, there are no heroes, no easy solutions, and certainly no happy endings.      

Bing Theater | $5 admission | Tickets: 323 857-6010 or purchase online.

Make a night of it! Learn more about the pop-up dinner before the screening and make a reservation.