Essay About Full Metal Jacket And Major Difference

Full Metal Jacket and Platoon
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Full Metal Jacket and Platoon are clearly two of the biggest movies ever made about the
Vietnam War; therefore, they will always be compared and contrasted to each other.
Platoon was based on Oliver Stones own experience so he used simple war movie
techniques to give a realistic sense of what jungle warfare was like. Kubricks Full Metal
Jacket was based on Gustav Hasfords experience, but Kubrick wanted to use the story to
explore what made people into killers. These two films take very different approaches
and if we are to compare them it should be in the capacity to understand what war means
to the average person.
Both of the films are very detailed in depicting what actual warfare is like; however,
Platoon gives a great sense of the environment: miserably hot, extremely intense, disease
filled, and a very scary environment no one would readily want to visit. Full Metal Jacket
explores this too, but focuses a lot attention on the process and training involved in
preparing for war.
These two films are a lot alike in two aspects: they both view the war pretty much
through the eyes of one soldier and they both seriously glorify war and make it
appear very glamorous. Both have strong male leads who it appears live in a strange
masculine realm where everyday rules do not necessarily apply to everyday people. This
concept is always appealing to males because even if they were never in combat they feel
as if they have “experienced” it. Both films explore the attitude of men wanting to and
even wishing for combat. They have the overwhelming desire to engage the enemy in a
battle to the death. Sadly this attitude usually ends in tragedy so the lesson here would be
be careful what you wish for.
A major difference between the two is in Platoon the soldiers are pretty much depicted as
brats who sit around and drink all day, do drugs, and even kill their superior officers. This
idea was touched on in Full Metal Jacket as well when a soldier, after “going crazy”, shot
and killed his senior drill sergeant; however, in Platoon this is more of a prominent
characteristic of the movie. In Platoon the main character is a rich college kid who
dropped out of college to perform his “duty” to his country, while Full Metal Jacket does
not portray anyone to be this smart or educated. That is if leaving school to go half way
around the world in a foreign land and get yourself shot at could be construed as smart.
Both films depict the harshness warfare has on ones body and more importantly ones
mind. They do however address this differently. In Full Metal Jacket we have the training
soldier who snaps and shoots his senior drill sergeant. There also is a scene where a
helicopter gunner is laughing and yelling as he guns down civilians working in a rice
patty, as well as the ending scene where a solider shots a Vietnamese sniper, who is just a
teenage girl, in the head. This is done without much said and an empty look in his eye so
as to detach himself from what he had just done. In Platoon American soldiers raid a
camp of Vietnamese and become so paranoid they begin to execute them in order to find
any weapons. Then an American soldier who believes a Vietnamese boy, who has one leg
and is half retarded, is