Realistic war movie with unrealistic warfare

Rating: 8/10 (23 June 2019)

Platoon is a distressing, dark, and disturbing film, but far too often it pulls its punches. Right out of the gate, Platoon sees our main character, portrayed by Charlie Sheen, starting his tour in the Vietnam War. What follows tries to be a serious, realistic vision of the war and its effects on our soldiers. For the most part, it succeeds. The story itself is the standard Vietnam story with some added dramatic elements and about half of the acting is pretty great (there are a lot of future stars here that I wasn't expecting to see). The other half of the cast ranges from below average to awful, but I'm not expecting an A+ cast in a war movie. My main issue is that even though they do express the atrocities of the Vietnam war and almost all of the characters felt real and I cared about what happened to them (whether I was invested in their survival or praying for their demise) even without contextualizing anything, Oliver Stone really dialed back the realism on the violence. Rarely do gunshots feel real, either the actual shot from the gun or the impact, and the blood effects are pretty terrible. I can understand toning it down if the level of violence was also toned down, but aside from a few events that we hear, but the camera cuts away so that we don't see, Platoon still has a lot of violence and death. No one ever acts like they were hit by a bullet, they just all of a sudden collapse and are covered in blood, there is no reaction to the impact and quite a few of the actors seem to think that a bullet wound causes generalized pain and not location specific. We see a head shot, but beyond a little skyward squirt, the only blood we see is a smear across where the bullet wound should be. I'm not asking for Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth levels of blood and gore, but if realism is the goal, it should be applied equally, especially if your movie is essentially meant to be anti-war propaganda, you would assume that he'd want to paint a full picture. The story is generic and the effects are bad, but it has heart and there is a level of enjoyment to be had just seeing all these familiar faces showing up looking a lot younger than we're used to (I'd recommend not looking at any cast listings, because finally hitting the credits and saying "I though that was him!" is a blast). One thing that I'm not quite sure about is whether the Vietnamese and Philippine actors were just really bad actors (a good number of them are Vietnamese refugees that just happened to be living the the Philippines when they were shooting) or if it's a cultural thing. There is one woman who has a very convincing performance, but most of them are just blank mannequins that don't convey any emotion and sometimes smile when watching their neighbors die. If it was just the VC, it wouldn't even be noticeable, but when we see individual actors for any prolonged amount of time, it becomes clear that they aren't "real" actors and are just trying their best. Platoon is a solid Vietnam War movie that hits all the emotional notes it tries to, but is missing any real artistic style. Basically, I wanted something more like Full Metal Jacket; unflinching and real, but with cinematography that felt like it belongs to a director's vision.