Full Metal Jacket to make this eclectic finale." Roger Ebert said, "The movie disintegrates into a series of self-contained set pieces, none of them quite satisfying." Julian Rice, in his book "Kubrick's Hope" (2008), sees the second part of the film as continuing the psychic journey of Joker in trying to come to grips with human evil. Tony Lucia, in his July 5, 1987, review of "Full Metal Jacket" for the "Reading Eagle", looked at the themes of Kubrick's career, suggesting "the unifying element may be the ordinary man dwarfed by situations too vast and imposing to handle". Lucia specifically refers to the
Full Metal Jacket reviews. Reviewers generally reacted favorably to the cast, Ermey in particular, and the film's first act in recruit training, but several reviews were critical of the latter part of the film set in Vietnam and what was considered a "muddled" moral message in the finale. It ranks on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills. Richard Corliss of "Time" called the film a "technical knockout", praising "the dialogue's wild, desperate wit; the daring in choosing a desultory skirmish to make a point about war's pointlessness", and "the fine, large performances of almost every actor", believing, at the time, that Ermey and D'Onofrio