A rather barren opening stretch of forty-five minutes or so in Marine boot camp, photographed in a shade of algae-green, trimmed with mildew-white, to ensure that the viewer's eyeballs have no pleasanter a time of it than the enlistees' bodies. After that, there is a marked improvement, all the way to a level of (so to speak) sustained unevenness. The Vietnam combat scenes, in particular, have exactly the sort of individuality and subjectivity so badly missing in boot camp; and the vast expanses of smoking, ruined, rubbled urban terrain (staged, bizarrely enough, in industrial England, and shot in Dali-esque deep focus) achieve a kind of nightmarish majesty, especially in the fading daylight that does so much to individualize the climactic combat scene. In other ways, this last scene -- a fiendishly accurate V.C. sniper, hitting groins and kneecaps at a distance of fifty yards, and making a drastic reduction in the number of dramatis personae we know by name -- drags the movie down to its lowest level since boot camp. It might have been more persuasive if only, like the earlier action, it had managed to do without the slow-motion. Slow-motion has become the cinematic equivalent to italics, caps, exclamation points, and other types of typographical tongue-lash: it doesn't take much of it to be in excess. And at legitimately emotional moments it tends to be in sentimental excess. Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey; directed by Stanley Kubrick. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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