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  • Full Frame
  • Dual Layer (RSDL 76.31)
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  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • French: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • Italian: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
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    English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Portuguese, English - Hearing Impaired, Italian - Hearing Impaired, Romanian, Bulgarian
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  • Theatrical trailer
Full Metal Jacket (Remastered)
Warner Bros./Warner Bros. . R4 . COLOR . 112 mins . R . PAL

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Decay, cruelty, the human race collapsing in upon itself. Familiar themes to those who are familiar with Staley Kubrick’s work, to be sure - but also plenty familiar to anyone who’s spent time in front of the nightly news or one of hundreds of documentaries about the horrors of the past, watching brutal conflicts unfold before their eyes and wondering what the hell it’s all for. Such an outlook was very familiar to moviegoers back in the 1980s as well, as suddenly film after film about war and its true cost made their way to the screen. Some looked into the betrayal of soldiers by their own country (Born On The Fourth Of July being a prime example) while others have explored the psychology of it all (Platoon, Causalities Of War and the mother of them all, Apocalypse Now). But one facet of the tragic art of human conflict never seemed to get much screen time - what actually created these human weapons? How is a dispassionate and efficient soldier moulded from a naïve young man?

The question of whether or not that soldier still retains any semblance of real humanity is one that the films mentioned above, as well as a great many others, have attempted to explore. But for Stanley Kubrick as he set about filing the Gustav Hasford novel The Short-Timers, that was a moot point - the military’s human end-product, a walking, talking and utterly soulless killing machine, was a given. The question was, how was that product made? Full Metal Jacket, which would turn out to be Kubrick’s penultimate movie, attempts to explore exactly that.

The film is split into two discreet halves; the first is set in a US Marine boot camp, as another batch of young recruits sets about learning the ways of soldiering under the command of a brutal, bigoted and unimaginably loud drill instructor, Sergeant Hartman (played with brutal intensity by a real military man, Lee Ermey). During their time there, the fledgling Marines are verbally, physically and mentally abused and tortured, all the time shedding their human selves piece by piece. It’s a very effective process, one which works exceptionally well - but a little too well in one case, and not quite well enough in another. That latter soldier, Joker (Matthew Modine) still feels some connection with his former civilian (and human) self, and when the second section of the film gets under way (in Vietnam itself) it is Joker who seems the most ill at ease with the situation he’s found himself in. But this doesn’t last long; as Joker and war’s brutality edge closer and closer together, what he sees - and what he ultimately has to do - will finally, inexorably, make a true soldier out of him. And having spent the better part of two hours with him, the audience is all too aware of the price.

Kubrick has thrown barbs at warmongering before, of course (in Dr Strangelove) but here he’s at his most deadpan, his familiar visual detachment countered by a script that’s less cynical than the director’s fans have come to expect (the screenplay was, in fact, co-written with novelist Hasford and associate producer Michael Herr, the latter of whom also wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now). But the result is as intensely compelling and hypnotic as the best of Kubrick’s work, aided by Doug Milsome’s stunning cinematography (despite being set in America and Vietnam, by the way, the film was entirely shot in England), utterly believable performances across the board, and a wonderfully atmospheric music score (credited to “Abigail Mead”, it’s actually written and performed by Vivian Kubrick, the daughter of the director who ten years earlier put together the Making Of documentary that appears on the DVD of The Shining, and who can also be spotted as a young girl in 2001). The end result may not please everyone - certainly, those looking for flag-waving gung-ho popcorn combat should look elsewhere - but it’s a remarkable and unconventional take on the modern war movie genre that’s ultimately more passionate on a human level than almost anything Kubrick had done before.

  Video
  Audio
  Extras
Contract

Another superb brand new transfer is being offered by Warner on this second DVD release of Full Metal Jacket, and while the original DVD release was adequate, this new transfer completely eclipses it - not surprising, as it was done with vastly superior equipment to the Kubrick-supervised original offering. The film is presented full-frame, with the full 1.33:1 camera negative visible, as per Kubrick’s wishes. Don’t feel put out by this, though - the director obviously composed his shots with this aspect ratio in mind, and the composition of many scenes actually makes more sense in this ratio. Needless to say, the DVD does not offer 16:9 enhancement.

This is a near-perfect transfer, with little to make negative note of apart from some minor, unbothersome aliasing. Picture quality is remarkable - rich in colour, high in detail and with an incredible sense of depth and clarity. Shadow detail is all-important in many sections of the film, and it’s spot-on. The layer change is placed as well as can be expected given the nature of the section of the film it’s in, and is quickly negotiated.

Those of you who live in Melbourne might remember that Full Metal Jacket was the first movie shown in Village Cinemas’ then-brand-new THX-certified showcase cinema at the Village Centre. Ironically, that cinema’s expensive THX show-off system was debuted in mono - because that’s how the audio for this film was originally mixed.

For this DVD, the audio has been extensively remixed for Dolby Digital 5.1 to great effect, while keeping to the spirit of the original mono sound (as all the remixed Kubrick Collection discs do). A fair bit of effort has gone into this one - aside from the easy job of re-transferring the score music and vintage pop songs in stereo, the engineers have also carefully reworked the movie’s sound-world for multiple channels, placing various effects across the front sound stage and (subtly) into the surrounds as well as adding some stereo reverb to some sections of the otherwise mono dialogue track. You can hear this cleverness at work sometimes - a mono helicopter, for example, becomes stereo thanks to the use of a digital delay - but it’s all extremely well done, and genuinely helps involve the viewer in the movie like never before. Incidentally, those after a laugh should switch to the supplied French or Italian audio tracks during the boot camp section of the film - hearing Sergeant Hartman do his thing with a bored Italian voice coming out of his mouth is nothing less than pure comedy!

The only extra: a brief theatrical trailer, remixed in Dolby Surround.


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  •   And I quote...
    "...while the original DVD release was adequate, this new transfer completely eclipses it."
    - Anthony Horan
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