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In 1987 Stanley Kubrick made his first film in seven years – since The Shining – and came up with a brilliant essay on the futilities and dehumanising effects of war. A brutal, incisive anti-war film, it revels in the ugly details of both boot camp and battle. It’s set at the time of the Vietnam War, but it could be any war.

Following the pattern of its source novel, The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, it is a film split into two distinctive acts. In the mesmerizing opening segment of the film, a tough and abusive drill sergeant (Lee Ermey) is attempting to mold a group of Marine recruits into savage fighting men. His message is simple: thinking is a vice and killing is a virtue. Unlike most of his peers, Private Joker (Matthew Modine) resists the programming. In the second half of the film, however, Joker is a combat correspondent for Stars and Stripes and is forced into battle following the Tet offensives. In the blitzed city of Hue, his values are put to the ultimate test.

Albert Camus once urged that men be neither victims nor executioners. This film shows how in Vietnam, American soldiers were both.

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Onofrio
Country: UK, USA
Genre: Drama, War

BD + DVD5 | VC-1 1080p, NTSC | 01:56:30 | 24.3 Gb + 2.81 Gb
Language: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish (Castilian), Spanish (Latin)
Subtitles: Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, English HoH, Finnish, French, German, German HoH, Italian, Italian HoH, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), Spanish (Castilian), Spanish (Latin), Swedish

Extras:

DISC ONE (Blu-ray)

• Commentary track with Adam Baldwin (Animal Mother), Vincent D'onofrio (Private Pyle), Lee Ermey (Gunnery Sergeant Hartman), and Screenwriter/Author Jay Cocks

• Between Good and Evil (SD, 31 minutes): Modine steps in with his castmates to unravel the film's development, casting, performances, behind-the-scenes conflicts, shooting challenges and, of course, Kubrick and his approach to the material, his actors and the production as a whole.
In English with English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish subtitles.

• Theatrical Trailer (SD, 2 minutes)

DISC TWO (DVD)

• Stanley Kubrick's Boxes (SD, 61 minutes): Boxes is a rather eccentrically produced documentary in which director Jon Ronson receives an invitation to the Kubrick estate following the famed filmmaker's death and is given the opportunity to explore thousands of boxes and catalog the contents. Ronson discovers a great many treasures, many of which had been set aside and boxed away decades before. The contents and materials inside mainly tell stories of what happened between the making of Kubrick's films.
In English with English, French, Spanish subtitles.