Depending on who you ask, war either never changes, or it always changes, but
one thing always stays the same: war is hell. Oliver Stone signed up with the
U.S. Army to serve in Vietnam and his experiences there left a profound effect
on him. However you may feel about him as a filmmaker, Vietnam is a bloody
thread that runs through all of his work. And in Platoon, his semi-autobiographical flick about the war, that thread is all knotted
up like a nest of snakes.
Charlie Sheen is Chris Taylor, an Army volunteer assigned to the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Almost immediately he realizes he is out of his depth: nearly all of the veterans are distant, ill-tempered and often cruel. Cruelest of them all is Sergeant Bob Barnes, a scar-faced psychopath who has shed all trace of his humanity and has come to embody war itself. No act is too evil if it serves the objective, not even threatening to shoot children to coax a confession out of village leaders. Under his command, men devolve into animals, some happier than pigs in shit (like Bunny, who revels in violence and murder for its own sake) and some for whom the loss of innocence kills something inside, like Taylor himself.
Taylor is torn between Barnes, and Sgt. Elias (a nearly fetal Willem Dafoe)
who in spite of the madness and cruelty all around him nevertheless manages to
enforce some kind of morality, which puts him directly at odds with Barnes.
Stone, who has never been big on subtlety, gives this moral divide an almost
explicitly religious cast, the devil and angel on Taylor's shoulders,
culminating in a very obvious Crucifixion motif in Elias' final death scene.
If you're coming at this film after having seen Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam War movie starring Charlie Sheen's father Martin, Stone's film is somehow both more bleak yet almost more hokey. Which one is better really depends on what you're looking for. Platoon, underneath its narrative about losing one's innocence and the societal failure of sending your poor and marginalized to fight a meaningless conflict as part of a broader Cold War game of tiddlywinks, is nevertheless a more traditionalist war movie with a traditionalist structure and pacing. Apocalypse Now is instead about moral failure, a profoundly amoral protagonist taking a long descent into madness, at the bottom of which is his moral equal, the fellow soldier he was assigned to kill. I think on balance I like Martin's movie better, but Platoon nevertheless has plenty to offer, a realist view of the American experience in Vietnam at the ground level.
As Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War go, Platoon doesn't usually garner the top spot on most must-watch lists. It might actually be too realist, too traditionalist, lacking the emotional manipulation of outright propaganda like We Were Soldiers but also never quite surpassing the mad nightmares of Apocalypse Now. But it is nevertheless honest, a film about what the average grunt faced every day, terror and boredom and bugs and heat and cruelty and recreational drugs and moments of insane violence and moral ruin.
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