Platoon (1986)

Every once in a while I will watch this film again and see if maybe I have grown tired of it. Surely after "Saving Private Ryan," "Titanic," "Crimes and Misdemeanors," or "Schindler's List" I have seen a better film. Well, after every viewing there is something about Oliver Stone's masterpiece that keeps me saying that I have never seen anything better.

I am a sucker for Vietnam pictures. "Apocalypse Now" and "The Deer Hunter" also rank in my top ten of all time. Stories about Vietnam can run the entire gambit of human emotions. "Platoon" is not only a documentation of America's sordid involvement in a foreign civil war, it is also a dramatic story of human response. A life developing in the most horrible of places.

There have been films put together better. There have been films with more detailed and interesting plots. But none have ever told a more touching story of human development set in the backdrop of bloody violence and inhuman suffering.

Rating: 10 out of 10.

Fmovies: Platoon is a must see for any fan of war movies. The film that put Stone on the map, Platoon is considered by Vietnam Vets as the most realistic (my father having been one of them). But in keeping the maxim of giving credit where credit is due, much of the success of Platoon belongs to military adviser Captain Dale Dye, who has been linked to pretty much every great war movie in the last twenty years. Much accolades to Tom Berenger as well, whose performance as Sgt. Barnes is the tour de force of his career (the scene in the village towards the end of the movie is brutal, befitting the character). With a great script, great performances, and awesome cinematography, Platoon is a surefire classic.

The 1980s in general and the mid 1980s in particular aren't highly regarded where pop culture is concerned , this is most especially true in cinema where films seemed to be written around their soundtrack in much the same way as Hollywood movies nowadays seem to be written around their special effects . PLATOON is one of the very few films from that period that has an emotional impact , an impact that it still retains while watching it in 2003.

Everyone else seems to have mentioned what makes PLATOON a classic anti-war ( Note it's anti-war , not anti American or anti soldier ) movie along with being a classic movie , so I won't go over old ground except to say THAT death scene is up there with all the other tear jerking scenes from 20th century cinema , don't be ashamed to say you cried

If PLATOON has a flaw it's in its duality , there's the good Sarge/bad Sarge , good officer/bad officer , good white guy/bad white guy , good black guy/bad black boy etc which is maybe a bit clichéd and possibly leads me to believe Stone is making an excuse/reason that the Americans lost in Vietnam because that spent so much fighting each other rather than the VC ( Though I do concede I'm possibly misinterpreting that as an excuse or even a reason since no one will confuse the politics of Stone with the politics of John Wayne ) while Taylor's character comes across as being more of a literary device rather than a real human being , but these are minor flaws

It's a shame to see war films from the last few years devoid of scathing anti-war sentiments like the ones seen here . PLATOON screams at you " War is hell and whatever the rights and wrongs of conflict you need a bloody good reason to wage war . Vietnam wasn't a good enough reason to sacrifice human lives "

Platoon fmovies. Platoon left me absolutely numb after watching it. Oliver Stone,(Who in fact did serve in Vietnam) did a fantastic job telling this story of the horrors and the insanity of the Vietnam war. What's to be admired about this film, is that Stone doesn't sweet-talk the story, with the good old American boys fighting for their country and facing brutality, instead he brings up a strong morality and humanity issue. It's wasn't all black and white, it wasn't one person was wrong, one was right, there was all shades of gray in between. He uses the characters of Sergeant Barnes and Sergeant Elias (both played brilliantly) as symbols of good and evil clashing into one another. Charlie Sheen (Chris, the narrator of the story) is in a sense torn between both, they are both a part of him as he tries to deal with things falling apart all around him. Vietnam was a senseless war, and Platoon tries to understand why we went through it and how we ever got through it.

At the height of the Vietnam War, America's teens are drafted into the war effort to find themselves in the middle of hell. One such young man is Chris Taylor. He is placed in a squadron where two sergeants have different approaches to the war – Elias is more about surviving without being brutal or cruel, whereas Barnes is crueller, more ruthless and more violent. During the course of his term, Taylor's very soul is torn between the two men as he deals with what he must do.

The first film in Oliver Stone's unofficial trilogy is arguably the best of the three. The basic story not only shows us what the war was like for those serving but also how the different personalities come out of those involved in it. As we follow Taylor we see him change as he is influenced by those around him and by his situation. It makes for an uncomfortable film but one that's worth watching. It's certainly a better war movie than things like Wild Geese or The Dirty Dozen, simply because it's a little more real to what happens than those ones.

Charlie Sheen has never been better than when he's acting for Stone. Here he gives one of his best ever performances as the innocent who is changed. Willem Dafoe is a great actor and here is no different – he also gives us one of the film's most enduring images so I'm a little biased. Berenger is another one for whom it's hard to think of a higher point reached than when he did this film. He is brutal and ruthless but he makes us support him in a strange way. The support cast are all good and contains a few famous faces (John C McGinley, Whitaker, Depp) however this is really a three man show.

Overall this is brutal and violent with no happy ending. At the end of the day isn't that what a war film should be?

Many great war films of the Vietnam conflict are centered around these themes of blurred morality and the uselessness of war, and Oliver Stone's Platoon is among the most well known. Stone, who wrote and directed the film and also served as an infantryman in Vietnam, first rose to fame for his war films that dramatized the infamous Cold War conflict. The main premise of his magnum opus are the inner conflicts within US forces deployed to southeast Asia, rather than the actual physical conflicts between them and the Communist-allied Vietnamese forces. More broadly, Platoon analyzes the "duality of man" concept that has been studied in numerous other works, from fellow Vietnam War films like Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Apocalypse Now (1979), all the way back to the latter's source material and inspiration in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Platoon focuses on the moral decay of soldiers in American units, and how this contributes to their inability to fight their Vietnamese enemies. Charlie Sheen sums up this theme with his on-the-nose voiceover, "We did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves... and the enemy was in us."

Vietnam War-movies tend to be even harder to watch than most war flicks, as the lines between the "heroes" and "villains" are blurred more than in any other dramatized period of warfare in recent human history. In wars like World War II, which are widely known for being as black and white as military conflicts have become, the contrasting features between the heroic forces we are meant to root for and their opposing enemy platoons are well defined. That is almost never the case with the United States-North Vietnamese/Vietcong conflict in Vietnam during the overarching Cold War.

That is not to say that most wars throughout human history have not been many shades of grey, with the winners and losers not always corresponding with the righteous and evil. But because of the guerrilla nature and infamous legacy of the Vietnam War itself - namely, the immense public protest against American involvement - the Vietnam War remains by far the most unpopular war in modern American history. With that said, most of the film is fantastic, from the aforementioned narrative to the grim lightning of the southeast Asian jungles that emphasize the film's tone, to the poignant, melancholic score.