Pvt. Joker wears a peace symbol on his fatigues and the slogan BORN TO KILL on his helmet.  When grilled by a Marine colonel as to what they represent, he pauses, then replies, "I guess it's a comment on the duality of man."
    Stanley Kubrick's latest film, Full Metal Jacket, also considers the duality of humanity's existence.  Yin and yang, good and bad, beginning and end, birth and death. The whole lot.
    The movie is broken into two parts -- half in the United States, half in Southeast Asia -- and relates the story of a gentle, good-natured soldier whose soul is twisted and hardened by war.
    There's Pvt. Joker at Parris Island, S.C., boot camp, patiently reviewing shoe-lacing procedures with a huge lummox called Pyle.  There's Pvt. Joker towering over a seriously wounded sniper lying in Hue's rubble -- flames illuminating half of Joker's face, leaving the other half in darkness -- coldly aiming a .45 at her skull to make a point-blank killing in the name of mercy.
    Full Metal Jacket begins warm and darkly funny.  It ends cold and solemn.  Kubrick's first film in seven years is a brutal, disaffecting experience, often too scattered or distanced for its own good.
    Comparisons with Oliver Stone's Platoon are inevitable, though not necessarily fair.  This is art versus  polemics.
    While Platoon strives to be the final statement about the horror of Vietnam, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket takes a step back and simply says "Here it is. You decide."
    Platoon is deeply personal and emotionally charged.  It uses the swell of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" to compound its wallop.  Full Metal Jacket is removed, dispassionate.  It's filled with innocuous '60s pop, "Surfin' Bird" and "These Boots Are Made For Walking," and the generation's popular M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.  These films are different entities, different planes of consciousness, sharing many of the same sentiments about the same war.
    More realistic than Apocalypse Now, more metaphorical than Platoon, Full Metal Jacket carves its own circuitous path.  It is a brilliant film, tethered by Kubrick's emotional restraint, particularly in battle.
    There's a problem when a war film's boot camp sequences are more memorable than its battle scenes.  And so it is with Full Metal Jacket, a faithful translation of Gustav Hasford's harrowing tale The Short-Timers.
    Hasford's chronicle also begins at Parris Island, although it's the sparest section of a gritty, brutal novel with an uncannily powerful visual sense.
    Kubrick has opened up the segment, using an encyclopedic array of camera tricks to charge through barracks and top obstacles high above green fields.  This is the definitive boot camp experience.
    Let the white-gloved inspections of An Officer and a Gentleman and Gardens of Stone drop out of rank.  Full Metal Jacket sends home the horror, largely through the presence of Lee Ermey, a former Marine staff non-commissioned officer, playing the squad's drill instructor.
    Like Cambodian refugee Dr. Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields and handless veteran Fredric March in The Best Years of Our Lives, Ermey is the perfect embodiment of his character.  He has lived the role and can project it with devastating fury.
    Snarling at his "Ladies" (his freshly shorn recruits), he forces them to march with one hand clamped on their crotches, the other on their M-14s.  He makes them sleep with their rifles.
    Jaw squared, standing at attention in front of his troops, he boasts of the marksmanship achieved by Texas mass murderer Charles Whitman and presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald: "Those individuals showed what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do.  And before you Ladies leave my island, you'll all be able to do the same thing."
    The D.I. abuses his recruits physically and verbally.  He breaks them down so he can build them up to a stone-cold killing machine.
    He succeeds only too well.  Although the inevitable conclusion of this first segment is telegraphed long before it is reached, its power is not diminished.  A trio of Oscar-caliber performances guarantee that -- Ermey as the sadistic sergeant, Vincent D'Onofrio as the dim-witted farm boy and Matthew Modine as Joker.
    Of the three, only Joker traverses the globe from Parris Island to Vietnam.  Full Metal Jacket is his story, although Kubrick takes a broader view and focuses on other soldiers, among them: Cowboy (Arliss Howard), who trained in boot camp with Joker; Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), a born killer; Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard), a combat photographer; and Eightball (Dorian Harewood), a gung-ho grunt.
    Joker carries a rifle and a pen as a reporter for Stars and Stripes.  He accompanies the troops to write two types of stories, according to his commander.  "Grunts who give half their pay to buy gooks toothbrushes and    deodorant -- winning of hearts and minds.  And combat action that results in a kill -- winning the war."
    On the eve of the 1968 Tet Offensive, in the city of Hue (pronounced WAY), Joker finds the stories increasingly difficult to compose.
    It is in Full Metal Jacket's second half that Kubrick's broad scope estranges him from the material.  Hasford's book is intensely personal.  Kubrick's cinematic style is aloof, like watching the war on the 6 o'clock news.
    There are other problems with Full Metal Jacket.  The voice-over narration is ineffective, telling what the audience already knows or sees.  A series of TV "interviews" with muddied grunts is contrived.  And there are two stilted scenes in which Kubrick's camera pans from one soldier to the next, with each man adding a sentence or phrase to the preceding infantryman's comment.  It's orchestrated anarchy and it doesn't work.
    Hasford's Short-Timers has a surreal tinge to it.  The movie's commentary scenes are their equivalent.
    Kubrick isn't as successful mixing heightened realism with surrealism in Full Metal Jacket as he was with A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  His earlier pictures could take liberty with fantasy and be filmed from an observer's point-of-view.  Full Metal Jacket demands intimacy and a sense of harsh reality.
    One of the most successful elements, surprisingly, is Full Metal Jacket's look.  The battle scenes were recorded at an abandoned gasworks outside London.  Palm trees were trucked in from Spain.  Signs were painted to resemble archival photos of Hue that Kubrick assembled.
    The gray cinder block and gray sky give Vietnam a new perspective.  This is the first picture about street fighting.  Aside from beiges and grays, its only colors seem to be blood red and olive green.
    The camera work is unadulterated Kubrick: close-ups of maddened eyes, a la Malcolm McDowell's in A Clockwork Orange and Jack Nicholson's in The Shining.
    The symmetry is here, as well.  Full Metal Jacket is a movie in two parts, a reflection on Joker's "duality of man."  It is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange -- three sections lasting 45 minutes each -- and Barry Lyndon, which has a plot trajectory that rises and falls with perfect conformity.
    Kubrick has addressed the insanity of war before, in two superior works, Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and Paths of Glory.
    Full Metal Jacket -- its title refers to the casing around a bullet -- is a bigger film, practically epic in scope.  Its size, with its corresponding view, has lessened its impact.
    Yet it transcends the level at which most directors work.  And it puts Kubrick back on track, a welcome development after The Shining.
    Platoon and Apocalypse Now were too easy.  With Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick and co-screenwriters Hasford and Michael Herr conspire to make audiences ponder war and the very essence of man's spirit.  With some reservation, it's safe to say they have succeeded handsomely.  4 star ranking
 

 Copyright Times Publishing Co. Jul 10, 1987