How a nation lost its innocence

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2003)

In one sense this can be seen as Oliver Stone's attempt to account for the massacre at My Lai for which Lt. William Calley was famously court-martialed. One recalls a statement made at the time by somebody in close concert with the logic of the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." But more inclusively, Oliver Stone's film addresses the question of what war does to us as it focuses on Pvt. Chris Taylor, played by Charlie Sheen, who gave up his student deferment, joined the army and volunteered to fight in Vietnam as his patriotic duty. How the twisted logic of war changes him and corrupts him and others in his platoon is the story of the film.
To Oliver Stone's credit it can be said that this movie, first released in 1989, helped to shock a new generation of Americans into understanding just why our involvement in Vietnam was a tragic mistake and to warn us not to do anything like that again. The fact that recent military adventures by the US have been limited engagements with limited objectives (instead of the vague and unrestricted policy of stopping the spread of communism, which was the rationale for the war in Vietnam)--engagements that have been carefully orchestrated to avoid becoming mired in the kind of hand-to-hand combat favoring the side defending its own turf as shown in this film, owes something to Stone's vision and to that of other film makers. One also recalls Senator Barry Goldwater R, Arizona) who advocated "winning" the war in Vietnam by "bombing them back into the Stone Age." Stone's film suggests just how impossible that would have been.
Tom Berenger gives a splendid and somewhat horrific performance as Sgt. Barnes, the "War Lover" (the phrase is the title of John Hersey's WWII novel), who kills both friend and foe indiscriminately. Willem DaFoe plays his opposite, Sgt. Elias who is the model of the good soldier. The rest of the cast gives fine support while the script by Stone, partially from personal experience, is full of authentic dialogue and veracious detail. The clash between our civilized nature and our baser instincts is well presented.
It is impossible to fairly compare this to other excellent Vietnam War movies such as The Deer Hunter (1978), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Apocalypse Now (1979), et al., because they are all so different. I do believe that Platoon was more of a throwback to World War II movies in the sense that it focused on the dynamics of the soldiers immersed in actual battles with the enemy. Yet on the other hand it falls completely within the Vietnam War genre by looking beyond the battles to address the larger question of why, and the war's consequences. In World War II movies, the why was never in doubt, and the consequences were not an issue.
The theme of this movie has been expressed as the loss of innocence, and that is a fair assessment; but I think it wasn't so much the soldiers themselves that lost their innocence, although many did, but a nation that lost its. We were a different country before Vietnam. We have never been the same since, and we will never be the same again.
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