It had been over a decade since Americans had pulled out of Vietnam. And while films like The Deer Hunter, Coming Home and Apocalypse Now had horrified and moved moviegoers during the years immediately following the end of the war, enough time had now passed for filmmakers to reopen the old wounds. Oliver Stone did just that in 1986 and it’s an experience that moviegoers and film lovers will never forget.
Stone’s Platoon tells the story of a newly arrived grunt ( Charlie Sheen) in Vietnam. His platoon has been slowly splitting into two camps – one led by the tough and scarred Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the other by the more levelheaded Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe). The new guy tends to gravitate toward the moralistic Elias, who like others, uses drugs to ease the suffering of the jungle and firmly believes that the U.S. is going to lose this war. Barnes, who has survived so many attacks that his company considers him indestructible, has no tolerance for defiance. This guy acts first with his gun, not his head.
Platoon doesn’t follow a single plot thread, instead favouring more of a documentary-like approach. It goes against the grain by not showing the audience every inch of the battlefield. There’s a tense anything-can-happen-at-anytime feel to it, as the enemy appears mostly in the shadows and in the sound of their gunfire. We watch their daily routine in agony, as these cocky and scared kids look alternately to get into and to avoid action. Barnes and Elias are father figures, representing the two paths a soldier could take in that war. Either you compose yourself and maintain your sanity or you let the madness swallow you up and make you part of the hellhole.
Where The Deer Hunter and Coming Home were mainly about the after-effects of the war and Coppola described Apocalypse Now as actually ‘being’ Vietnam, Platoon comes as close to putting us in the shoes of a soldier as is possible in a work of fiction.
As something more like a horror film than a war story – with its unseen enemy and friends dropping like flies – Platoon maintains a sense of fear through a barrage of sound, fury and violence. By taking a Lord of the Flies approach with the platoon split into two camps, Stone is able to comment on the nature of war, and suggest why the Americans were destined to lose.
Platoon remains one of the best war films ever made and, quite arguably, the best ever about the war in Vietnam.
