I was once told by Jonathan Rosenbaum, that Sam Fuller had no use for Full Metal Jacket. When Rosenbaum expressed his enthusiasm for the Kubrick Movie, Fuller would have none of it: “It’s a recruiting poster.” I can’t agree with the assessment, but I love him for making it. And I love him even more after seeing the reconstituted version of The Big Red One, painstakingly assembled by Richard Schickel, someone else who cares a great deal about how war is represented onscreen. Chopped down to a stately (for Fuller), elegiac, relatively old-fashioned 113-minute war movie in 1980, it is now, at two hours and 40 minutes (not the four-and-a-half hours of myth), a very different experience. This is a movie about the hell of being at war, the tedium of it, the callousness shown by the charmed living toward the soon-to-be-dead. Crassness aside – and what would a Fuller movie be without crassness? – it now lives up to the words that served as both its original tag line and its final voiceover: “The real glory of war is surviving”.

Kent Jones, Film Comment, May-June 2004