Hoo boy. Where do I begin? I think this movie is mostly well-made and mostly deplorable, but it made me have intense philosophical debates with myself like no other film in recent memory, the kind that people claimed Prometheus caused. It’s kind of crazy how the dehumanization depicted in Full Metal Jacket (my knowledge of military films is incredibly incomplete, but wasn’t that the first film to acknowledge the psychological torture of boot camps?) has been fully integrated into the modern military film, but the message of it (that maybe this is not a good thing for humans to do to each other) has been completely lost. In general, this film made my feminism (of course women should be allowed to participate in all aspects of life men do!) fight with my anti-militarism (I don’t think anyone should be put through this) to the point where I didn’t know whether Demi Moore’s character to succeed.
That push-pull could have been the basis for a masterpiece, but the themes are so muddled, and so many punches are pulled (flack from her fellow trainees are pretty much limited to “ew, girls!” and the idea of rape is presented only once before weirdly vanishing) that it’s hard to credit G.I. Jane as anything other than a jumping off point for a more interesting conversation. Case in point: the film sees no conflict in presenting entry into the Navy Seals as an unequivicolly Good Thing, while presenting those that run the military and country as having unequivicolly Compromised Intentions. How can serving in the military be good when you are forced to take orders from those whose intentions you can’t trust? In general G.I. Jane suffers from 90’s military syndrome, where the idea that you are signing on to be a hired killer was too abstract because it had been so long since we had lasting wars. You get the idea that Ridley Scott doesn’t really care about duty or honor, he just thinks that the military is badass, which leads to a lot of the film (especially early on, with the constant percussion-driven score) feel more like a Tony Scott film than anything.
It also serves as a hearty reminder that you can’t separate social and political issues from one another. The same way you can’t examine poverty without examining racism, you can’t examine feminism without examining militarism, which is what makes this film’s attempts at feminism so sad. In failing to examine how the military represents all the worst and most prominent aspects of masculinity, the film almost sees Demi Moore’s journey as a her OVERCOMING her femininity. Her victory is that she absolutely sheds everything feminine about her: her hair is shaved, she stops getting her period due to loss of body weight, even her big dramatic climax peaks with her shouting “SUCK MY DICK” to her drill instructor.
All her feminity is reserved for the borderline pornographic work-out scenes, which are a whole other bag of icky. Hey Ridley, I think there’s a way to shoot the female form, and to show how muscular it is, without forty shots of her amazing ass. And maybe, in a film like this, the kind with an ostensible message, you should opt for that! Just a thought!
The film does have redeeming aspects: the initial training sequences are bracingly physical and exciting and it feels like one of the only Ridley Scott movies to not suffer from pacing. I think Demi Moore is kind of miscast, but rarely distractingly so. And Viggo Mortensen does a great job. And I am honestly grateful for the film giving me so much to chew on, even if it appears it was mostly unintentional.
Martha Marcy Nash and Young 