Pivotal at the time but hasn't aged as well as some other Vietnam films

Rating: 6/10 (1 June 2015)

Platoon is the film that not only put director Oliver Stone well and truly on the Hollywood map, its huge critical and commercial success also would set the Vietnam War film cycle into hyper-drive. It centres on a platoon on a tour of duty in Vietnam through the eyes of a young recruit who quit college to volunteer for active service. It is in essence a combat film where the view is at ground level. In this sense it mixes traditional gun battles with the smaller more personal details that show the discomfort of life in the jungle. Its approach was very realistic for its time and in some ways it did reinvent what a war film could be.
While it does have many scenes of combat action, they are pretty messy and unglorified and the film has a pretty clear anti-war message. This is conveyed in quite a major way by how the platoon itself is portrayed. It's divided into two camps led by two diametrically opposite sergeants Barnes and Elias (Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe, respectively). The former is a facially scarred, violent man, while the latter is a morally sensitive borderline hippy. They show both sides of the American thinking about the war, with Barnes and his alcohol drinking followers the ugly brutal side of the coin and Elias and his marijuana smoking buddies the ones who question the participation of their country. This dramatic tension is brought fully to the fore in the pivotal moment of the film where the platoon commit mass murder and rape in a village, in a nod to arguably the most infamous real event in the war, a massacre at the village of Mai Lai in 1968.
The dramatic conflict, while being the real meat of the film, does look quite overly simplistically done to my eyes now, with the evil Barnes and his bevvy merchant bad boys set against the hippy-like Elias and his chilled-out troops. It comes across as too black and white. It gets the message across but it does so with little subtlety or grey areas. I think Platoon overall, has aged a little worse than some of its contemporaries like Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987) or Casualties of War (1989). This is probably a lot to do with Stone's overly politicised message, while the classical music which soundtracks the grimmest moments probably felt original at the time but now almost comes across as, dare I say it, a little cheesy. The film benefits somewhat from having quite a good cast, some of whom are actors who would go onto big careers, although in truth future mega star Johnny Depp makes absolutely no impression whatsoever in his minor role as a translator.
All-in-all, Platoon is still an impressive combat film but it's one which for me has not aged too great in other ways. It still has historical importance as a key entry in the sub-genre though.