Where to watch Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Full Metal Jacket is available to stream in ES on Movistar+ and FILMIN. It can also be rented or bought from AppleTV and Amazon.
A young Marine witnesses how brutal training reshapes recruits before serving as a military journalist during the Vietnam War. From boot camp humiliation to deadly urban combat, he confronts the psychological damage, moral confusion, and dehumanizing forces surrounding soldiers on both sides of the conflict.
Cast: Adam Baldwin, Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Dorian Harewood, Kevyn Major Howard, Arliss Howard, Ed O'Ross, John Terry, Kieron Jecchinis, Kirk Taylor, Tim Colceri
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Trivia & production notes
- Stanley Kubrick discovered the source novel The Short-Timers while reading the Kirkus Review and spent two years reading it twice before committing to adapt it for film.
- Kubrick changed the film's title from The Short-Timers to Full Metal Jacket after coming across the phrase in a gun catalogue, worried audiences would misunderstand the original title.
- Kubrick spent three years persuading Vietnam War author Michael Herr to work on the screenplay, describing it as a single phone call with interruptions.
- R. Lee Ermey was originally hired as a technical advisor and asked Kubrick for an audition after the director told him he wasn't vicious enough for the drill instructor role; Ermey then improvised insulting dialogue with Royal Marines to demonstrate his capability.
- Kubrick incorporated a 250-page transcript of R. Lee Ermey's improvised rants into the script and estimated that Ermey wrote 50 percent of his character's dialogue.
- During rehearsals, Kubrick's assistant Leon Vitali threw tennis balls and oranges at R. Lee Ermey while he delivered his lines at rapid speed, requiring 20 error-free consecutive runs.
- Kubrick harbored an irrational fear of actor Bill McKinney based on his role in Deliverance, which the director described as containing the most terrifying scene ever filmed; McKinney was paid in full despite his audition being canceled at the airport.
- The film was shot over one year starting in August 1985 across multiple English locations, including a decommissioned Royal Air Force station and a disused gas works that Kubrick had buildings demolished on to recreate the city of Huế.
- The boot camp scenes required the actor recruits to shave their heads once a week for continuity, and Ermey yelled at them for 10 hours a day while filming without rehearsing together to keep their reactions authentic.
- R. Lee Ermey suffered a car crash during filming that broke several ribs, making him unavailable for four and a half months.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Full Metal Jacket, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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