Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Adam Baldwin

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I know...

Did I Like It: Any criticism of a Kubrick movie has a certain limitation right out of the gate. There is likely no greater director from an aesthetic point of view. Even if someone has the gall to dismiss any of his movies as boring—a critique often leveled at 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—no one can say his movies look bad. This film is no exception. His pure photographer’s eye is incapable of being distracted from his intended purpose. If you haven’t gotten around to see any of his films—as I had with this one—and profess to love cinema, then you probably better fill out the gaps in your experience.

But there are a few things that strike me about the film as it proceeds.

Normally, I would be very dim on a film which spends as much time on a first act that doesn’t really serve the story later on, but once again Kubrick’s artistry is such that I’d be willing to give him a break on almost anything. You can swing your arms and hit films that depict the insanity and absurdity of war, but few are willing to drive home how foolish something like basic training can become.

I was surprised by how much popular music Kubrick used in the film, as I would have assumed it would be filed to the brim with classical selections. Then again, if Kubrick simply duplicated his choice from 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (1971), that wouldn’t be worth his time or mine.

I’m also struck by a phenomenon unique to his films, and its a thought that flies in the face of how I’ve viewed his films in the past, especially 2001. He shoots in an aspect ratio that would actually maintain—more than any other films from the era—the experience as much as possible when viewed on televisions before the ubiquity of widescreen sets. There is no need to Pan and Scan his films. It’s staggering that he could both work to create an experience that simply must be experienced on the largest screen possible and could be viewed on a crappy VHS copy without having any of the frame summarily lopped off.

Jurassic World (2015)

Director: Colin Trevorrow

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, BD Wong

Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, sure.

Did I like it?: If a movie isn’t a Marvel movie, chances are it is a legacy sequel. Some have been delightful, like Halloween (2018). Some groan through the bloated run time and are instantly forgotten as soon as the lights in the theater come up, like Tron: Legacy (2010) or, for a far more apt comparison here, Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). 

Why does this one work so well? One might be tempted to say that it doesn’t try to groan its way through including an aging cast member in the proceedings, and lets us learn to like the new characters that are the vehicle of the plot, but movies like Star Trek (2009) and the aforementioned Halloween’s best moments are with Leonard Nimoy and Jamie Lee Curtis. Even so, this film has a reprisal from BD Wong as geneticist Dr. Henry Wu, but it’s not exactly like that was a special moment in the trailer or a focal point in the poster.

Maybe Jurassic World’s secret weapon lies in a mostly successful attempt to capture the spirit of the original film and not just pepper the film with references to the original and jam it into some kind of framework that would be more palatable for a modern audience. The references are there—an extended sequence in the ruins of the original park from Jurassic Park (1993) and a few brief glances at a book written by Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)—but they aren’t the main thrust of the plot. I’m looking in your direction, Luke/Anakin’s lightsaber. The movie tries its best to capture that Amblin spirit, complete with a sensitive, mop-topped young boy dealing with the fantastic things around him while the family situation may be unravelling a bit.

It doesn’t hurt that the true focal point of the film is one of the more charming movie stars to become a leading man in recent memory, Chris Pratt. He manages to sell the notion of trainable Raptor soldiers, and that isn’t exactly something that any other actor could make watchable. Sure, the special effects have already aged a bit even in the five years since its release, where the first thing remarkably holds up after thirty years, but it is imminently digestible entertainment, and that is all that it aimed for.