When I was 15, it felt like everyone in my all-boys school discovered Full Metal Jacket at the same time. And it’s impossible to overstate what an impact it had on us at that age. We thought it was the ne plus ultra of hardcore, grown-up filmmaking and we made sure we could recite pretty much every line from scratch. God, we were insufferable.

Watching it now, it’s hard to be completely objective because of the oversize impact it had on me/us at that age. But the thing that stands out is just how much it feels like it was specifically designed to appeal to teenage boys. But being teenage boys, we completely missed the ironic detachment of the film and so we just saw the whole thing as a big macho act. We missed the fact that the scenes, each iconic on its own, never really cohere into a truly effective whole, especially with the bifurcated structure of the story.

A flawed masterpiece.