Historical Accuracy - Full Metal Jacket
For my second critical response to a movie’s historical accuracy, I chose “The Full Metal Jacket”. The movie focuses on army boot camp and the Vietnamese war.
First and foremost, I would like to say that this movie is not meant to be historically or factually correct, but is still based on memories. The movie is based on a novel “The Short Timers” by Gustav Hasford or as we know him, the Joker. He was a Marine correspondent in the forgotten war. The movie has been complimented for the first half of it and how accurate the boot camp was. The Marines who trained at PArris ISland did say that they were treated similarly and even though it might be hard to believe, received absurd punishments as well. Some sources say that in real life the situation was worse.
Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the sergeant who insults the platoons in a very creative way, was actually a real sergeant. The actor was originally hired as a consultant on scene, but caught the eye of the director and was given the role. He even wrote his own insults that are used in the movie. (
Even though the boot camp was relatively accurate, some sharper eyes have noticed a timeline mixup. In the movie a book “The Word for World is Forest” which was published 8 years after the movie is supposed to take place. Most likely does not ruin the interpretation of the events, but still serves as a funny mistake.
Moving on to more serious matters, the second half of the movie was not that accurate. From other sources, the biggest critic that I found was that the weapons in the movie could not have been right. For example a scene in which a young girl is a sniper, she uses a rifle that is not accurate. Meaning that at the distance that she was, in real life she would have never been able to shoot that perfect shot. The other issue was that the Vietnam war was actually mainly fought in the jungles rather than towns.
Despite a couple of flaws, the fighting was not fully wrong. Some of the war tactics used were from actual war. Exactly like shown in the movie, the Vietcong made bombs and dropped them on US troops, or used their bombs and rearmed them. Also, the tunnel system was also used to escape easily. However, for me one of the most disturbing scenes of the movie was the teenage sniper. Unfortunately that was the reality. Kids and women were all fighting, it was not an unusual occurrence.
To conclude, even though the movie was factually correct at all times, it still conveys a message to the public of how harshly the marines were treated at how violent the war was.
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