Stanley Kubrick's penultimate film is a harrowing, foul-mouthed and violent Vietnam War drama. But, unlike the rainforest horrors of Apocalypse Now or Platoon, Kubrick's film begins with a long training camp sequence in America before moving to a bombed-out Vietnamese city. While its message is simple - innocent young Americans are taught to be machine-like killers - its technique is extraordinary. Because Kubrick refused to travel any distance, it was shot entirely in Britain, with palm trees uprooted from Spain and Matthew Modine and a cast of relative unknowns uprooted from Hollywood. Renting a disused gasworks in Beckton, east London, Kubrick created a huge and spectacular outdoor set, though some sequences, it must be said, lack tropical realism. The performances are superb, especially Lee Ermey as the drill sergeant with a colourful vocabulary, Vincent D'Onofrio as the pathetic Private Pyle and Modine as the cynical recruit called Joker.

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the U.S.-Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.