Wow! What a movie. Spoilers included (duh).

So we start off Kubrick’s classic Vietnam War film with the dehumanizing act of shaving the heads of the new recruits. These “maggots” will soon be shaped into Killing Machines, property of the USA. The Drill Sergeant makes an effort to put these young men through HELL because ultimately that’s what war is. Kubrick, having a problem with authority figures in the Western World, makes an equal effort to depict the “good guys” (from a western perspective) as bloodthirsty monsters or at the very least, willing to comply with orders they understand are heinous and inhumane. The first 30-50 min of the movie are vastly different from the second part. Private Pyle being beaten and broken down and eventually murdering the Drill Sergeant (and himself) represents the soul-crushing feeling of being denied your own agency, a common Kubrick theme. But at the same time it represents a sort of impotence of rules and etiquette that the military tries to instill in its soldiers. The main soldier Joker is never in danger technically in the first part. But when they get to Vietnam, they see real innocent Vietnamese people getting murdered for no reason other than the fact that they were born in the incorrect country according to the US. One soldier brags about his kill count, many of them being innocent farmers. The main character joins Stars and Stripes Journalism (military propaganda) They lie about war reports in news papers, they film mass killings and wonder why the locals don’t like them, the whole time, racial and ethnic slurs are tossed around. They depict the Tet offensive as cowardly while they shoot women, children and animals from the safety of a helicopter. Kubrick does a spectacular job of capturing the duality of the military. They want prim and proper young men that are ready to murder innocents in cold blood. I highly suggest anyone watch it. It is a great Anti-War film that was important to be made at the time it came out.