10. FULL METAL JACKET (1987)
The big rap against Full Metal Jacket has always been that it peaks too soon – that the episodic second half of the movie doesn't live up to the tight, intense and brutally funny boot camp sequence it follows. (The other knock on Jacket is that it was filmed in England. Please. You people don't think 2001 was actually shot in outer space, do you?) Despite countless homages and parodies of R. Lee Ermey's indelible drill instructor Sgt. Hartman (many of them courtesy of Ermey himself), however, it is the Vietnam portion of Full Metal Jacket that has proved most influential on war movies of recent vintage. Efforts ranging from Jarhead to Redacted to HBO's recent Generation Kill have drawn on its loose structure, black humor and profanely poetic dialogue (much of which is ripped directly from the pages of Gustav Hasford's novel, The Short-Timers). The complaint has never made much sense to me anyway, as it seems clear that Kubrick is deliberately contrasting the regimented structure of basic training with the free-form chaos of actual warfare. None of this is meant as a knock on the movie's endlessly rewatchable (not to mention quotable) first half, but merely to suggest that Kubrick's film as a whole has held up far better than many of its contemporaries, and deserves a spot on any list of the greatest war movies.
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