The Big, Bold, and Beautiful Vietnam

Rough. Rugged. Scarred. Dehumanizing. Full Metal Jacket and Platoon conjure up these images in one’s mind. While neither movie won me over for cinematic quality (how can you compete with Star Wars and Avatar?), both were most intriguing. Full Metal Jacket dissected boot camp for young enlistees in the Marines and then the psychological aspects of war, whereas Platoon probed the physical characteristics of war, with minimal psychological references.

Full Metal Jacket undertook the responsibility of addressing the psychological harm done during boot camp and subsequent deployment in the armed forces. At the beginning of boot camp, the sergeant in charge automatically begins breaking down the new recruits, to the extent of giving them new names, in an attempt to breed the men into killing machines. This chosen plot pathway yields the director an important theme to play off of: creator versus creation (a bit like Frankenstein), a noteworthy theme, in my book. After successfully breaking down Private Pyle, great strides are made in his rebirth into a killing machine. The theme beings to play an important role in the movie after his rebirth because Private Pyle’s state of mind begins to wane, which cause a psychotic break. The shooting of their sergeant by Pyle exists to illustrate the military’s over reaching moral power and consequences.

Not only did the creator versus creation play a central role in the movie, notably the first third of the movie, dehumanization became a more important theme towards the latter portion of the movie. As the soldiers began to realize they didn’t understand what they were fighting for, they started questioning authority all together. I wish that would have been the case. Instead of soldiers questioning authority, they automatically engaged in whatever activity they were told to do: slaughtering villages of people and report false information, among other things. Joker, a main character, narrator, and levelheaded individual, represented a recruit whom boot camp did not change, evident by his ability to stand up to the sergeant and the “born to kill” slogan on his hat with a peace symbol pin on his shirt. That isn’t to say that Joker didn’t want to kill, it suggests Joker played an essential role in conveying the issues many people had with the Vietnam War: a war without an apparent cause or enemy and the duality of human beings.

Platoon, much like Full Metal Jacket, covers the issue of soldiers listening to their superiors without thinking. Incidents like that lead to massacres, such as the My Lai massacre. Soldiers feel like they couldn’t control anything, largely due to the way they are trained, or reborn; the only thing they can control is how intoxicated one gets, a pretty said demise I must say. Platoon showed the up-close and personal effects on the war, from the soldiers’ perspective.

While Full Metal Jacket embraced the psychological aspects of the war, Platoon depicted what war was like on the front lines. Each movie was equally effective in conveying what I felt was the point of the movie: Full Metal Jacket attempted to highlight the psychological effects of boot camp and war, while Platoon aimed at portraying life as it was on the front lines. All in all, Full Metal Jacket gave me a run for my money in the sense that it really made me stop and think. I couldn’t sit down and watch the movie in its entirety due to the psychological aspects. Platoon on the other hand was an easy to watch, enjoyable, action movie, with one or two psychological breakdowns in-between. Platoon presented a much more realistic viewing of one’s preconceived notions about what the Vietnam War looked like (trenches, hidden enemies, forests, etc). Full Metal Jacket, in the end, just made me stop and think—about anything, life, psychological breakdowns, military, creator versus creation, Frankenstein, and corruption.