Formal Film Study Q2: The Deer Hunter(1978), Full Metal Jacket(1987), and Apocalypse Now(1979)

   

 Clearly, the main thing that binds these movies together is the Vietnam War, but I have found that they all focus on their own specific aspects of the war.  The Deer Hunter focused primarily on what life is like after return from the war.  Full Metal Jacket takes the viewer through more of an experience from getting drafted through the actual war experience.  Finally, Apocalypse Now doesn't really focus on home life at all, but rather focuses on what war can do to a person.  Each movie really provides its own glimpse at what the effects of war can do to a man but they do so in their own particular way.

One similarity that I noticed between The deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now was the stress of the soldiers losing their minds due to being in the war.  Walken's character Nick clearly has gone nuts by the end of the movie as represented by the scene at the end when De Niro's character goes back to Vietnam to bring him home and Nick ends up killing himself.  Although De Niro is traumatized from the war as well, he is still able to think logically but he fails to realize that Nick is not the same person as he was before they went to war.  You can't blame him for trying to save his friend from the deep depression metaphorical rock bottom that he has hit, but as a viewer, you know that Nick is already gone.  In Apocalypse Now it starts out with Martin Sheen who is clearly already dealing with horrors from the war illustrated by him destroying his hotel room in a drunken rage. He is then asked to find a Colonel who has gone crazy and is commanding some natives in the Cambodian Jungle.  So the insanity is more evident from the start in Apocalypse Now but the idea of people going to war and coming back completely different people is stressed.  Even though both of these examples never end up actually going back home.  One of the main sequences of Full Metal Jacket is focused around the insanity of Private Pyle but it differs from the other two movies in one major aspect.  Private Pyle goes insane before he even leaves for Vietnam.  Instead, it is the constant abuse he receives from Gunnery Sergeant Hartman that eventually pushes him into killing both Hartman and himself.  I'm not sure if the director was trying to make a point by adding this aspect of the movie, but I can't imagine the U.S. military was all that happy with the portrayal of a U.S. soldier killing himself and his superior due to constant ridicule.  I suppose the director was just making the same point the other two movies were making, war can do some pretty messed up things to people.  

One of the cinematic elements that was used in all of these movies was using the soldiers' facial expressions to show the viewer what they were thinking in that scene.  I think this might have something to do with how soldiers aren't supposed to express their feelings or what they are thinking, they are just supposed to do what they are told.  But the directors were trying to show that these soldiers do have morals and opinions about what they are doing even though they aren't able to just say it. I have found this to be true with most of the war movies I have seen.  But the thing I have noticed about these facial expressions is that there only really seems to be two or three.  One shows the viewer that they are really uncomfortable with what is going on or they are disturbed by what has just happened or what is about to happen.  The other facial expression shows that they have no feeling or emotion at all about what they have done or are about to do; like they have no guilt for these terrible things.  Relating to what I talked about earlier, these facial expressions are one of the main things that help the viewer to distinguish who still has their morals about them from those who maybe have gone a little crazy.

It is interesting that the majority of both Full Metal Jacket and Deer Hunter take place before or after the soldiers are even at war, while Apocalypse Now pretty much all happens while Martin Sheen is over seas.  All three of these directors really had their own agendas when it came to the point they were trying to get across by making these movies.  When I chose these three movies, I expected them to be a lot more similar, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I got a different taste of the Vietnam war with each of these movies.  I have gotten completely different feels for what the Vietnam war was like from other movies and books about the Vietnam war such as The Things They Carried or Platoon(1986) and think that this all relates to the over all ambiguity of the war itself.