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General		Extras
Category	War	Theatrical Trailer(s)	Yes, 1 - 1.78:1, Dolby Digital 1.0
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1987	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	111:47 Minutes	Other Extras	Menu Audio Collector Card
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (76:30)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	2,4	Director	Stanley Kubrick
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Matthew Modine  Adam Baldwin  Vincent D'Onofrio  Lee Ermey  Dorian Harewood  Arliss Howard  Kevyn Major Howard  Ed O'Ross
Case	Snapper
RRP	$29.95	Music	Abigail Mead

    How cruddy is this film? Let me count the ways: Gustav Hasford's semi-autobiographical novel The Short Timers, upon which this travesty is based, spans somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and eighty pages. Hasford also contributed to the writing of the screenplay, at least according to the credits. From what I understand, however, Gustav Hasford and Stanley Kubrick, who also wrote, produced, and directed this mess, soon parted on very hostile terms. Given that less than half the detail of the novel is captured in this film, I cannot say that this is a particular surprise. All of the dialogue in this film is incompletely, poorly, and half-heartedly copied from the novel, as is the story and most of the events depicted. The only line in the whole film that has the same comedic value as it did in the novel is the following one spoken by Drill Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey): "I do not look down on niggers, wops, kikes, or greasers... here you are all equally worthless!" After the delivery of this hilarious line, or rather, after boot camp, it all goes downhill, and it all goes downhill fast. During the sequence in which Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) kills Hartman, the dialogue is so cheesy that you could be forgiven for thinking you were staring at a stuffed-crust pizza. The problem is that most of the dialogue sounds like it was simply recited verbatim from the book with about as much inflection as one of those voice synthesizer programs that used to be sold with sound cards. The conversations in which the principal characters, especially Joker and Animal Mother, are trying to intimidate one another suffer especially from this stale delivery.

    To get an idea of how bad this film is as a War film, consider the final sequence which is set somewhere on the battlefields of Vietnam, but looks like it was shot in Birmingham. This sequence and most of its dialogue actually occurs halfway through the novel, but the film ends about two minutes after it is completed. Some of the scenes in the novel that do not make it into the film, all of which are crucial to the development of the characters, particularly that of Sergeant Joker (Matthew Modine) can be listed from memory. They include Drill Sergeant Hartman's drowning of Private "Pyle" in a toilet bowl, the exhibition of a war propaganda film, Rafter Man's (Kevyn Major-Howard) untimely death beneath the wheels of a tank, and Joker's attempt to refuse his promotion to the rank of Sergeant. Those are just the critical, and often highly amusing, scenes that I can remember right off the top of my head. If I still had a copy of The Short Timers handy, I'd make a comprehensive list of all the critical scenes in the novel that do not appear in the film. As it stands, it stretches the very definition of pathetic when you cannot get half the detail of a 180-page book that mostly consists of expletives into a two-hour film.

    If you can call the direction and writing of this film a complete disaster, then you have to at least admire what the acting department does in spite of it. Matthew Modine does well with a severely under-developed character, and we even get to see a vaguely good performance from a Baldwin brother (I'm just as amazed as you are), in this case Adam Baldwin as the seriously mean Animal Mother. However, if there is a real star of this film other than the crappy sets, it is a close match between Vincent D'Onofrio as the executionally challenged Private "Gomer", and Lee Ermey as the sadistic drill Sergeant from hell. If you're a serious fan of Stanley Kubrick's work, then I don't need to tell you the reasons why you should or shouldn't buy this film. But if you want a good war story, then I suggest going for Das Boot or even Starship Troopers instead. Either that or wait for such masterpieces as Platoon to get a DVD release.

Video

    I had seen this film before on VHS, and I expected this transfer to be a hell of a lot worse than it actually is. The film was originally released in 1987, and it often looks at least twice as old as it is due to the insane intentions on the director's part for the home video release. Compared to more recent releases, the transfer lacks definition, but compared to the VHS release it looks absolutely fine. Film grain becomes a small problem in some scenes, but never enough to detract too much from the film. The shadow detail was rather limited, but it was acceptable for a film of this vintage. A lot of night-time sequences in this film have never looked quite so good, to tell you the truth. No low-level noise made its way into the picture, although some sequences exhibited a hell of a lot of lens flare that was brought into sharper focus by the higher resolution.

    The colour scheme was quite dull and muted, in contrast to the colour scheme of most films set in the Vietnam War. According to the credits, the entire film was shot in the one location, and it would not surprise me to learn that this location was part of the same studio lot in England where parts of Trainspotting were filmed. A splash of colour, particularly blood red, makes its way into the film from time to time, and these splashes are quite well-rendered. No MPEG artefacts are visible in the picture, although the majority of the backgrounds were blurred out on purpose. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some aliasing in parts of the picture, but this was never a significant problem. Film artefacts were abundant, with a number of scratches becoming apparent on the transfer from time to time.

    The disc is presented in the RSDL format, with the layer change at 76:30. This is right in the middle of a conversation, and it is rather disruptive to the flow of the film.

Audio

    If there is one thing that annoys me more than an inadequate sound mix, it is music that has been ruined by an inadequate sound mix. Not that the music in this film is particularly good to begin with. The music in this film is a combination of rock-and-roll songs from the Vietnam War era, such as The Rolling Stones' much-loved classic Paint It Black, and an original score by Abigail Mead. The original score made a lot of use of some very dry-sounding synthesizers, and generally had a grimy, diseased feel to it that was reflective of the mood in the scenes that it accompanied, most notably the murder-suicide at the end of the brutal training on Parris Island. Apart from its use in that one scene, where you could hear a lot of sounds struggling to escape from under the limitations of the mix, it was more or less completely unremarkable. A lot of the pre-existing songs in the film's music were not very appropriately chosen, and detract more from the feel of the film than they aid it. Because of the limits of the mono audio soundtrack, the entire selection of music in this film was often reduced to little more than an indistinct rumble in the background. This film is in dire need of better score music, and a multi-channel remix.

    The surround channels and the subwoofer spent the entirety of this film twiddling their sonic thumbs, bored at the complete absence of any signal to amplify and thrill the viewer with. Given the amount of sound effects present in this film that would have been a lot better with the appropriate subwoofer support, this is truly unforgivable. The lack of bottom end on the plethora of explosion and gunshot sounds is just not palatable.

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Theatrical Trailer

Collectible Card

• Collectible Card

    The video quality is great by comparison to VHS standards, but poor compared to DVDs of films that have similar vintage.

    The audio quality is mediocre at the best of times.

    The extras are barely a step above non-existent.

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Audio
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