Full Circle

After watching the beginning and ending of Platoon and Full Metal Jacket again, I really tried to focus on how each director presented the movie and how they tied together with each other. In Full Metal Jacket we are introduced to a close up shot of soon to be Marines getting their heads shaved. Following the haircuts we see them lined up in front of their bunks while the Drill Sargent does the usual introduction of yelling and degradation of the soldiers. We get introduced the main characters and get a brief idea of their personalities as we follow their progression as they ready themselves for war. In Platoon, we immediately go right into the heart of the battle, there is a somber presence as we see body bags, and the harsh conditions soldiers must go through in dealing with this war. The character "Joker" in Full Metal Jacket starts off in the movie as someone you don't expect to fight in a war and kill, but in the end we see that in the given situation he must put aside everything and finish his task at hand. Charlie Sheen's character at the end mentions that "We did not fight the enemy, we fought oursleves..." I think the message kubrick was trying to say was that war itself will change a person and when one enters it, he must leave behnd everything, even himself. The song he chooses in the opening scene expresses that of the soldiers leaving their lives and literally saying "Hello to Vietnam". Kubrick opens the movie the way he did to emphasize the lost of indivuality and control, he is saying that you become nothing more than a robot trained to combat. In Platoon I concluded that Stone was empahzing the result of being in the war, and how the duration of it changes a person's mentality/personality. Once you overcome the the idea that you are killing innocent people it becomes second nature and you have no emotional connection; it isn't until you leave and reflect back on what actually occured and why you did what you did that you realize you lost who you were and literally became a "robot". The ending of FMJ shows Joker killing the girl, which I thought was the turning point in which he becomes that "robot" soldier. Platoon ends with a soldier leaving the war and reverting back to his life, and FMJ displays Joker becoming the soldier that Charlie Sheen's character was.