Stanley Kubrick’s
Full Metal Jacket is often remembered as essentially being two movies. Its bravura bootcamp sequence made an unlikely superstar out of the late Lee Ermey and launched Vincent D’Onofrio’s journeyman career. In contrast, most viewers saw the film’s second “half,” (actually the longer of the two parts), as being much more disjointed and difficult to follow. However, I believe Kubrick’s goal in crafting
Full Metal Jacket, was to create a “shadow” version of
2001: A Space Odyssey, his epochal 1968 film. All of Kubrick’s post-
2001 films make references to
2001 – some obvious, some subtle – and