Because we didn't finish talking about the beginnings of the movies in class, I analyzed them more. But then Platoon's beginning compared to Full Metal Jacket's entirety is where I ended up. Both movies conveyed the transition of the Vietnam soldiers' perspective of life. However, they did it differently from one another.
Full Metal Jacket started out with country music that made you laughed because of the ironic imagery on the screen of the men getting their heads shaved, ready for boot camp. The first half of the movie was boot camp, which Platoon skipped over completely. Throughout boot camp the men slowly went from young fresh faces to young fresh faces ready for combat. They just had more confidence, until they got to Vietnam, until the transition from preparing to fighting. Platoon showed the same transition the Marines made, but rather quickly. They showed Charlie Sheen, Taylor's, face coming off the plane after landing in Vietnam and he was clean and ill informed of what was going on in the war and what he got himself into. Platoon quickly shifts to the men that have been there for a year or years, where Charlie will be eventually, but their faces are dirty and wounded. Their eyes have that "1,000 mile stare" that Marines got after finding out what the war really was. Innocent killing, death of friends, and the posibility that you could die out there. Full Metal jacket takes the whole movie to do the same thing, not until Joker contemplated killing the girl at the end did his wounded face appear.
FMJ's rhetoric of this scene in a Marines career in Vietnam was very detailed because it was the movie, Joker's transition. Platoon did this too but foreshadowed it when Taylor got off the plane in the beginning. This foreshadowing led the viewer to believe that this would happen and we watched it happen to Cherlie Sheen but in FMJ since Joker joked so much you kept thinking he wouldn't be changed by the end of the movie, it suprised me and the last scene was very hard to watch, it was very serious, which was in great contrast to Joker's personality.