Brutal, Honest, Horrifying...

Rating: 10/10 (3 October 1998)

Coming from someone who has actually been to war, this is an honest and grueling masterpiece which has been under-rated for a long time. They say 'Ryan' broke all the rules for a war movie, go see this one then. Platoon's main villains are in the platoon, who brutally kill fellow soldiers and murder innocent Vietnamese including women and children just for fun. Charlie Sheen plays his best role portraying Oliver Stone in the war, who is probably the only director to make a war movie out of his own experiences. Tom Berenger and Kevin Dillon are the most menacing characters I have ever seen, the only characters I personally wanted to kill on film. To be a Vietnamese watching this film must have been an awful, mind-numbling experience: watching your own descendants get brutally mis-treated as in this movie. 'Saving Private Ryan' was a very good film, but sending the overused message "war is bad" is pretty old, but this film is the first to show how Americans were the real enemy. Did Oliver Stone get a medal for this?