Full Metal Jacket Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

Full Metal Jacket is the only war movie that has ever terrified me. When I was a kid it had virtually the same effect on me as a horror movie. That makes some sense if you think about it. What isn’t scary about war? Aren’t war movies that claim to be anti-war more than a bit disingenuous? Depicting the viscera of bodies blown apart or the heart pounding excitement of bullets flying turns war into entertainment. There’s almost no way around it. Once it’s been staged and committed to film you almost can’t avoid the accusation that you’re glorifying war.

Serenity Movie Review

Seven years ago I went into the cinema to watch Serenity not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know anything about its writer and director Joss Whedon, who already had a cult following for his “Buffy” TV series and its spinoff “Angel.” I had also never heard of his short-lived series “Firefly,” canceled after a mere 13 episodes, which served as a precursor to the film. All I knew was that I was totally enthralled by the universe presented on screen.

Serenity’s amalgamation of the science fiction and western genres was unlike anything I’d seen to that point and in retrospect it’s almost an obvious combination to make. The premise is that 500 years in the future, the earth has become uninhabitable and the population has been relocated to another system of planets terraformed for habitability. There is an alliance that controls the central planets but at the edges of the system life is governed by a kind of Wild West code of justice.