Full Metal Jacket looks nothing like the Vietnam movie I expected. Does that make it unrealistic?*

I finally went back and watched Full Metal Jacket again, and one thing kept bothering me. This is one of the most famous Vietnam War movies ever made, but it doesn't really look like the Vietnam I expected to see on screen. There is surprisingly little traditional jungle warfare. A huge part of the movie takes place during Marine boot camp, and when the story finally moves into combat, much of it is urban fighting in the ruins of Hue. Then there's the strange fact that Stanley Kubrick filmed the entire movie in Britain. Bassingbourn Barracks was used for the Marine training scenes, while London's old Beckton Gasworks was transformed into the destroyed city of Hue. Knowing that makes some of the locations look very different once you start paying attention. But I think it's important to separate "this doesn't look like Vietnam" from "this isn't a Vietnam movie." The Tet Offensive included some of the most significant urban fighting of the war, particularly in Hue, so Kubrick wasn't simply inventing the idea of Marines fighting in a city. He was choosing to focus on a particular part of the conflict rather than giving us the familiar Hollywood version of soldiers disappearing into a jungle. The boot camp section is another interesting case. R. Lee Ermey wasn't just an actor playing a drill instructor. He had actually served as a Marine drill instructor and was brought onto the production as a technical adviser before eventually getting the role of Gunnery Sgt Hartman. And yet the movie is obviously still a movie. Kubrick wasn't making a documentary about the Marine Corps or attempting to recreate every aspect of the Vietnam experience. He was interested in what military training does to a person's identity and what happens when that training meets the reality of combat. Even Roger Ebert criticized the artificial appearance of the British locations, arguing that some of the later battle sequences looked more like conventional Hollywood war movies than the Vietnam he expected. That's what makes the movie fascinating to me. It can be incredibly convincing in one scene and completely artificial in another. So I'm curious about the people who actually served. If you were in the military, how did Full Metal Jacket strike you? Did the training scenes feel authentic? Did the combat scenes feel believable? Or did the whole thing feel like Hollywood from beginning to end? And for those of us who never served, should we judge a war movie mainly by its historical and military accuracy, or can a movie be powerful even when its presentation is heavily stylized?