Anti-military sentiment in film

Wow, it's been a long time since updates. Hopefully this makes up for it:

I was thinking about this the other day: It's always been pretty funny to me that people don't realize the anti-military overtones of Forrest Gump... it's subtle, but most people don't pick up on it. What it basically boils down to is the fact that the reason why Forrest excels in the Army is because he's stupid, and isn't smart enough to think for himself.

If you wanted to go back and look at some more of these examples, you would probably start with Stanley Kubrick's Paths Of Glory, a movie that was shocking in its time for its satirizing and condemning of the military. It was banned in France for a long time (it's based on a French military incident), but it's clear that the film is aimed at all nations and all men. Kubrick was also taking a stab at the entire military establishment in general with his satirical look at the kind of mindset required by a person to make such easy choices of life and death.

The most famous scene of the film comes at the end, where a young captive German woman (played by Susanne Christian, who would later become Kubrick's wife, Christiane Kubrick) is brought out on stage to sing to the French Army. What follows is an extremely moving metaphor for people putting aside differences (language barrier, war status) and living in peace.

Years later, in 1987, Kubrick returned to make a completely different kind of war film. Full Metal Jacket examined not the utter senselessness that is war, but instead the emotional destruction that comes with being in the military. The wonderful opening sequence, edited in-synch with the music, shows the soldiers, one by one, getting their heads shaved. The sequence is brilliantly conceived. These are not men, these are not soldiers - these are cattle, brought in and systematically readied for the fight.

This idea is further explored later on, as we see that Pyle, a screw-up from the first day and a person that couldn't do anything right, only really succeeds as a soldier after he starts to lose everything that makes him a human being.
It's amazing to me that more people don't realize what's really going on in the film. Full Metal Jacket is a popular war film, and isn't viewed as anti-war or anti-military usually. Because it's entertaining and even humorous in parts, people just take it at face value. It's quite easy to do that in a time that gives us films like Tears of the Sun or We Were Soldiers, not much more than glorified action pictures that don't really say anything.
In the first half of the film, in the boot camp sequence, Kubrick shows us visually in the film, over and over again, the claustrophobia that is the military: All sequences that show soldiers are static shots, and are composed in the complete center of the frame. The emotional claustrophobia is presented visually in these sequences. The "order" and "discipline" are manifested in visually uncomfortable compositions (it's quite subtly strange to watch film compositions that are completely centered in the middle of the frame for that amount of time). The only time that the camera actually moves from these static, centered frames is when the drill instructor comes into a scene. In these cases, the camera tracks with him, stirring up the visual concept. Then, when he leaves, the camera becomes static once again, reflecting the blank slate that has become the soldiers' minds. It's quite remarkable.

And of course, everything is summed up in the end when Kubrick makes a final statement, this time not just on war or the military, but a statement on mankind itself.