Drama · War
American
1987 · Directed by Stanley Kubrick · 117 min
A group of young American recruits is broken down and rebuilt as Marines, then sent into the Vietnam War. Stanley Kubrick splits the film into two distinct halves, and it treats war as a system of language, training and image-making. The tone is cold, darkly comic and unsettling.
Why it matters in cinema history
A major late-career work by Kubrick and one of the key Vietnam War films of the 1980s. It stands out because it replaces the jungle epic with a study of indoctrination and language.
Watch with intention
Watch the film as a study of how language and performance shape people, not only as a story about combat.
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