![]() ![]() Dialogue is often unintelligible, but that’s due to subjects’ fatigued mumbling or barked rapid-fire orders as much as to any recording difficulties. John Stutzman’s relaxed score provides a surprising counterpoint to the tense onscreen content. Auds can, and no doubt will, read into the pic whatever political agenda they came in with. Nonetheless, the wide-format images - by turns formally crisp and hand-held frenetic - as well as his tight editing vividly convey the confusion engendered by extreme discipline, and the intense emotions felt by the young recruits. While chapter intertitles obscurely hint at humor (while referencing the events we’re about to see), Brumley otherwise maintains a strictly neutral, nonjudgmental p.o.v. Documentary feature that tells the true story of a Marine who served in Iraq by hiding his homosexuality, until his experiences there inspired him to speak out about the war and travel the country with an acclaimed one-man show based on his personal journals. The first section of Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” comes to mind, although shorn of all melodrama and nearly all human interest, this nonfiction portrait is an even purer distillation of famously brutal Marine training methods. With Jason Alameda, Sam Mendes, Alex Ryabov, Angel Serrano. Grueling physical challenges culminate in an epic “death march” with full gear in sweltering heat. Such are the rigorous standards that it can take seven men to properly make one bed. Already hard to differentiate as individuals due to their uniforms and shaven heads, recruits in Platoon 1141 emerge as separate beings only in moments when one of them commits some blunder, prompting sustained humiliation and punishment from their drill sergeant. Sans narration or interviews, pic echoes the breakdown of individual will and buildup of team-mindedness that comes with indoctrination.
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