One movie that takes a different approach to the Vietnam War is "Full Metal Jacket" (1987), which shows the war's brutality and moral ambiguity. This film showed the high tension between soldiers and their commanding officers. The film portrays how commanding officers can use physiological effects on their soldiers to make them become better soldiers. This movie showed how poorly these young men were treated at home bases in America and Vietnam.

 

An exciting scene in the movie is one where they are still in boot camp, where a commanding officer tries to make the privates quiet in multiple complex and unbearable physical tasks. One private, Private Pyle, seemed to experience more trauma from the physical challenges and mental games the commanders played, eventually causing him to take the life of his drill sergeant and his own. Quentin Taratino explains, "through Private Pyle's character, Stanley Kubrick showed that regardless of who you are and what you can do, war will wipe all that away, leaving the darkness and a killer in you" (Taratino). War can bring out the beasts within all men, something most of them have never seen in their whole lifetime.

 

"Full Metal Jacket" shows its audience the brutal and dehumanizing aspects of war and how young men cope with them. The drill sergeant embodies brutality, led by his relentless training to transform young boys into killing machines. After boot camp, the soldiers were deployed, and they immediately ran into struggles. Vietnam showed these soldiers how hard it was to fight a war in a foreign country and the cultural and language barriers they faced. The guerrilla war tactics used by the Viet Cong were also shown in the film, portraying how brutal war was for any foreigner in Vietnam.

 

One aspect of "Full Metal Jacket" is that not many other war films do the atrocities committed by American soldiers. In a scene where a private Joker was in a helicopter heading to a destination for photography, he shared the aircraft with a soldier firing a machine gun out the plane's side door at innocent civilians. A real-life example of an atrocity committed by Americans was the massacre of civilians in My Lai, which is explained by History.com Editors "A company of American soldiers brutally killed most of the people—women, children, and old men—in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 people were slaughtered in the My Lai massacre, including young girls and women who were raped and mutilated before being killed" (My Lai Massacre). The film has horrific but true aspects of the Vietnam War within its scenes, which is vital for the American public to know, as it is our history.