Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 war film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay he co-wrote with Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford.

The second half portrays the experiences of Joker and other Marines in the Vietnamese cities of Da Nang and Huế during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War.

The recruits graduate, but the night before they leave Parris Island, Joker, who is on fire watch duty, discovers Pyle in the barracks latrine loading his service rifle with live ammunition, executing drill commands, and loudly reciting the Rifleman's Creed.

Following Hartman's death, Joker becomes a sergeant in January 1968 and is based in Da Nang for the newspaper Stars and Stripes alongside his colleague Private First Class "Rafterman," a combat photographer.

Michael Pursell's essay "Full Metal Jacket: The Unravelling of Patriarchy" (1988) was an early, in-depth consideration of the film's two-part structure and its criticism of masculinity.

[21] Julian Rice, in his book Kubrick's Hope (2008), saw the second part of the film as a continuation of Joker's psychic journey in his attempt to understand human evil.

[22] Tony Lucia, in his 1987 review of Full Metal Jacket for the Reading Eagle, examined the themes of Kubrick's career, suggesting "the unifying element may be the ordinary man dwarfed by situations too vast and imposing to handle".

He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all the whims, shades and modulations of personal expression.

"[24] Michael Herr wrote of his work on the screenplay, "The substance was single-minded, the old and always serious problem of how you put into a film or a book the living, behaving presence of what Jung called the shadow, the most accessible of archetypes, and the easiest to experience ... War is the ultimate field of Shadow-activity, where all of its other activities lead you.

[27] In 1983, Kubrick began researching for the film; he watched archival footage and documentaries, read Vietnamese newspapers on microfilm from the Library of Congress, and studied hundreds of photographs from the era.

[12] Kubrick worried the audience might misread the book's title as a reference to people who did only half a day's work and changed it to Full Metal Jacket after coming across the phrase in a gun catalogue.

McKinney was known for his role as a rural psychopath in 1972's Deliverance, most memorably in a sequence that Kubrick described as "the most terrifying scene ever put on film".

[42][43] Scenes were filmed in Cambridgeshire, the Norfolk Broads, in eastern London at Millennium Mills and Beckton Gas Works in Newham and on the Isle of Dogs.

[45] Bassingbourn Barracks, a former Royal Air Force station and then a British Army base, was used as the Parris Island Marines boot camp.

[28] A British army rifle range near Barton, Cambridge was used for the scene in which Hartman congratulates Private Pyle for his shooting skills.

[29] Kubrick's daughter Vivian, who appears uncredited as a news camera operator, shadowed the filming of Full Metal Jacket.

According to an interview in the January 1988 issue of Keyboard, the film was scored mostly with a Series III edition Fairlight CMI synthesizer and a Synclavier.

[59] The 2020 4K UHD release uses a new HDR remastered native 2160p that was transferred from the original 35mm negative, which was supervised by Kubrick's personal assistant Leon Vitali.

The summary states; "Intense, tightly constructed, and darkly comic at times, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket may not boast the most original of themes, but it is exceedingly effective at communicating them.

[106][21] Richard Corliss of Time called the film a "technical knockout", praising "the dialogue's wild, desperate wit; the daring in choosing a desultory skirmish to make a point about war's pointlessness," and "the fine, large performances of almost every actor", saying Ermey and D'Onofrio would receive Oscar nominations.

Nathan said after the opening act, which concerns the recruit training, the film becomes "bereft of purpose"; nevertheless, he summarized his review by calling it a "hardy Kubrickian effort that warms on you with repeated viewings" and praised Ermey's "staggering performance".

Hall commented the film ends abruptly but felt "it demonstrates just how clear and precise the director's vision could be when he resisted a fatal tendency for indulgence."

"[104] Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader called it "Elliptical, full of subtle inner rhymes ... and profoundly moving, this is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since Dr. Strangelove, as well as the most horrific.

[103] Gilbert Adair, writing about Full Metal Jacket, commented: "Kubrick's approach to language has always been of a reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic nature.

He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all whims, shades and modulations of personal expression.

"[109] Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called Full Metal Jacket "strangely shapeless" and awarded it two and a half stars out of four.

Ebert called it "one of the best-looking war movies ever made on sets and stage" but said this was not enough to compete with the "awesome reality of Platoon, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter."

[110] Time Out London disliked the film, saying: "Kubrick's direction is as steely cold and manipulative as the régime it depicts," and that the characters are underdeveloped, adding "we never really get to know, let alone care about, the hapless recruits on view".

Me love you long time," which is uttered by the Da Nang street prostitute to Joker, became a catchphrase in popular culture[127][128] and was sampled by rap artists 2 Live Crew in their 1989 hit "Me So Horny" and by Sir Mix-A-Lot in "Baby Got Back" (1992).

when describing how she felt as a child that her goal of one day working as a professional actress would be limited due to the lack of representation of Asian performers in popular culture, suggesting she considered she might someday play a sex worker in a film.