Welcome To Viet Nam, the Movie: II FULL METAL JACKET Directed by Stanley Kubrick Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford

By RICHARD CORLISS

Act I: As the country crooner sings "Goodbye, sweetheart, hello, Viet Nam," 17 Marine recruits get their heads shaved. The long, defiant hair of the late 1960s falls to the floor; the young men look sullen or stern. Do they know that this is a pre-op for a lobotomy? Double time, in their eight weeks at Parris Island, S.C., they will be stripped of their freedom, their pride, their names. The recruit who dares to hang some John Wayne sarcasm on the drill instructor will be called Joker (Matthew Modine). The guy from Texas will be dubbed Cowboy (Arliss Howard). Gomer Pyle is the name given to a fat bumpkin (Vincent D'Onofrio) whose dim-witted sanctity begs to be beaten into lean meat. The D.I. (Lee Ermey) will oblige. He will shape Pyle into an M-14 with a loaded magazine -- a full metal jacket. Then Pyle, like his sweetheart of a rifle, will go off. The killing machine will be fired too soon. His last smile will be one of emotional vacancy, for he has achieved the purity of madness.

With this splendid first 45 minutes of his new film, Stanley Kubrick reenters the real world. For a quarter-century the reclusive director has hit the cerebral fantasy button, in Pentagon war rooms (Dr. Strangelove), in outer and inner space (2001: A Space Odyssey), in the nightmare future (A Clockwork Orange), in the duplicitous past (Barry Lyndon) and down the endless bloody corridors of a deranged mind (The Shining). Now he's back. Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie grunt. The boot-camp sequence begins as high farce, with the D.I. taunting his recruits in arias of obscenity that tickle and singe the ear. Kubrick's majestic camera tracks across the barracks, it ascends obstacle courses, it glides past the soldiers, then abruptly cuts to close-ups, to study their pain head on. Their faces are fists clenched in rage and fear; they know that farce is about to replay itself as tragedy. The Marines never quite recover from the inevitable explosion. The film never quite survives its bravura beginning.

Act II: Viet Nam, just before the 1968 Tet offensive. Local hookers peddle their pleasures while Joker and a soft, eager photographer called Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) dodge thieves and boredom. Their job is to rouge up the war for the Stars and Stripes, to turn the horror into cheering press releases. No soldier believes a bit of it. Everyone has reached a state of exalted cynicism. "Welcome to Viet Nam, the Movie," Joker sneers to an American camera crew. "You think we waste gooks for freedom?" says the Marine called Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin). Crazy Earl (Kieron Jecchins), who poses next to a sprawling Viet Cong corpse, pays ironic tribute to the enemy: "After we rotate back to the world, we're gonna miss not havin' anybody around worth shootin'." Later, when he picks off a couple of V.C. like fairground ducks, his face creases in a smile of dread and awe.

Maybe because it was shot in England instead of the Philippines, Full Metal Jacket is clothed not in the lush tropical colors of other Viet Nam films but in the desaturated green-gray of a war zone as it would appear on the 6 o'clock news. Hue might be Pittsburgh. Here, only death looks luscious: gunfire makes a gutted warehouse flare into brilliant orange, and the blood of strafed civilians waters the countryside, turning it into poppy fields. The drama is desaturated too. The soldiers have no ideals to defend, just their asses; the accompanying music is not Samuel Barber but inane party rock of the '60s like Wooly Bully and Surfin' Bird. In this second section the movie becomes a notebook of anecdotes, always compelling, but rarely propelling the story toward its climax. Unlike Oliver Stone's Platoon, with which it will unfortunately be compared, Kubrick's film does not want to say every last word about Viet Nam. It wants to isolate a time, a place and a disease.

Act III: A sniper shoots one, then another, member of Cowboy's platoon. How many of the enemy are inside the building? How many live bodies should Cowboy offer up to fulfill the Marines' tradition of recovering their dead and wounded? How does any officer stanch his men's righteous bloodlust? And what does an honorable soldier do when confronted with a killer's face, as pretty as an M-14, that pleads for mercy killing?

As Kubrick returns to the movie mainstream, he also waters down his material with a Hollywood ending. So far, he has closely followed his source novel, Gustav Hasford's taut, scary The Short-Timers. Now -- we will say no more -- Kubrick pretties up the climax with a bogus moral dilemma and some attenuated anguish. A viewer is finally left to savor earlier delights: the dialogue's wild, desperate wit; the daring in choosing a desultory skirmish to make a point about war's pointlessness; the fine, large performances of almost every actor (Ermey and D'Onofrio seem sure shots for Oscar nominations); most important, the Olympian elegance and precision of Kubrick's filmmaking. Full Metal Jacket fails only by the standards the director demands be set for him. By normal movie standards, with whatever reservations one may entertain, the film is a technical knockout.