Best Film About the Horrors of War--A Lesson We Still Need to Learn

Rating: 10/10 (22 October 2007)

For about 20 years, from roughly 1950 to 1970, war films were largely about selfless heroes, often depicting World War II soldiers whose morality would make the likes of Gandhi or St. Francis of Assis proud. By the 1970's, film rhetoric about war began to shift to another angle. By the time of the release of Platoon, films began painting an altogether different portrait of the war experience from the perspective of the private on the ground rather than from a general or colonel. "Platoon" never depicts high-ranking officers discussing tactical plans in an administrative room or racing around in jeeps, saluting the troops. This is war at the ground level where the battles are fought and people suffer and die, regardless of the cause and the winners. From the perspective of "Platoon", nobody "wins".
Although war brings out heroism, it more often brings out the worst because the stakes are so terribly high. War is rarely about heroes; it is about survival at all costs which can incite much immoral behavior. More often, soldiers will hide the truth, debase themselves in front of superiors, unjustly blame inferiors, exploit circumstances for advancement, and kill without provocation. These behaviors are true as much among officers as enlisted men, and these are the realities that Oliver Stone, the director and writer of "Platoon", explores instead of the glossy triumphs of other films. And this is a world he knows intimately because Platoon is a semi-autobiographical account of his experience in Vietnam.
Aside from being one of the most terrifying films I have ever seen, "Platoon" is about finding meaning in a situation that appears to be about nothing more than senseless violence, destruction, and killing. But that meaning is not equated with the moral metaphors of earlier Hollywood offerings whose canvas depicted the good guys and the bad guys in very distinct colors. Here, everything is blurred from the American soldiers to the misty jungles of South Vietnam. Only the poor villagers who have been caught in the gunfire are truly innocent, and they are the ones who pay the highest price. The landscape is populated with the scar-ridden Barnes (Tom Berenger), who regards the war as a personal proving ground, Elias (Willem Dafoe), the lone moral voice of the platoon who comes into conflict with Barnes, Lt. Wolfe (Mark Moses), probably an ROTC graduate whose sum total of war experience is marching around college sophomores at the Ohio University campus, Sgt O'Neil (John McGinley), a hot-headed flip-flopper when it comes to loyalty, and Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), who joins the platoon out of civic duty. But after about 20 minutes, Taylor realizes that no one has a sense of duty on this playing field.
The strength of "Platoon" is how real and devastating it all seems. The audience feels like they are walking along side these men and experiencing the war with them. And unlike most action movies, which build toward climatic sequences, the moments of combat explode from nowhere, often during a subdued moment, which is probably closer to the real experience of engagement. One of the most frightening moments is when Charlie Sheen, just relieved from guard duty late in the night, sees in the distance a group of enemy combatants combing the foliage for potential prey. We see the enemy from Sheen's point of view, silently moving through the shrubbery like evil specters. Neither Dracula nor Frankenstein were ever this terrifying. The private who relieved Sheen of guard duty has fallen asleep, putting Sheen in a precarious predicament. He can neither make a move for his gun which is just out of arm's reach or call to his fellow soldiers lest risk being a target of enemy gunfire. What can he do?
One other scene I found particularly convincing is a moment late in the film when Sgt O'Neil played with brilliant angst by John McGinley asks for a furlough from Sgt Barnes, played with subtle wicked believability by Tom Berenger. When Berenger denies the request, McGinley becomes emotional, letting his inner fears of their coming confrontation out into the open. I believe that McGinley's performance is one of the best I have yet seen in terms of accurately portraying a soldier's dread of combat. For a moment, I forgot I was watching a movie and thought I was in Vietnam.
These are the kinds of dilemmas that permeate throughout "Platoon": no win situations in which everybody loses, regardless of the outcome. Unlike the war films of the heyday of the studio system that featured the likes of John Wayne propagating how heroic the Americans were in the cause of the allied forces in World War II, the message of Platoon is far less romantic but many times more profound. War is hell, and the message is to tell others the story of this hell to prevent its recurrence in the future. In short, war should be prevented at all costs. It has probably been a profound shock to the filmmakers that this simple message was disregarded 20 years after the release of this film. We are still a country that has not quite learned the lessons of Vietnam.