Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is a somewhat realistic film. The movie creates a very disturbing and realistic picture of the Vietnam War not through historical accuracy or sensitive treatment of characters, but by presenting a series of situations that span an entire war. It seems as if these situations were the experiences of one set of recruits from start to finish. In this file there are no full-blown characters and they are never developed enough for one to become the center of attention. They are also called by nick names rather than revealing their names to allow the audience to develop a personal link with any individual character. The Marines are just that, Marines, not people; In a more conventional film, the Marines might be people in the beginning and anonymous killers by the end. In Full Metal Jacket the Marines are anonymous recruits in the beginning and anonymous killers in the end. And the viewer gets to see the transformation from anonymous recruit to killer because the film starts in boot camp rather than in the field. The film begins at the beginning, showing the recruits at boot camp and shows the recruits follow through to the war. .
In the beginning scenes where it shows the recruits going through an obstacle course Kubrick edits the scenes so the viewer sees the repetition of physical activities to indicate the endurance needed to make it through boot camp. The boot camp segment of the film relentlessly cuts from one activity to another, allowing little time for the viewer to think about what is happening. In this scene Kubrick cuts scenes very fast and showing only short clips of what the men are doing. This cutting from one scene to the next shows the harshness of boot camp and avoids the need to reveal the information in more obvious terms. Very little is said about boot camp and it is almost all visual not very many words are spoken during this scene. .