Remembering

Rating: 10/10 (14 May 2006)

Twenty years later, after PLATOON was released in 1986 and brought some of the horrors of the Vietnam experience to the public's media-jaundiced eye, at last the film can be seen and discussed critically. 'At last', in this viewer's vocabulary, includes the fact that more time for healing from actually being in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 has passed, making the response to Oliver Stone's film more rational. Now the film is a film, not a nightmare memory inducer, and that fact in no way diminishes the power of the message.
Oliver Stone wrote and directed this musing on the effect of war on the psyche and emotional crippling that Vietnam produced in those who survived. Stone was there and that makes his cinematic lead Chris (Charlie Sheen), an random kid from a privileged family who volunteers to go to Vietnam for 'patriotic reasons', an exception in the platoon to which he is assigned, the leader of which is the mentally broken and emotionally scarred Staff Sgt. Bob Barnes (Tom Berenger). Chris' positive influence is Sgt. Elias Grodin (Willem Dafoe), and the two are the polar opposites of evil and good. But the main characters of this gripping film are the other kids who daily are subjected to the horrors of life in the Vietnam jungles with the atrocious living conditions of filth, rain, heat, vermin, and the constant threat of the VC hidden in the atmosphere, ready to kill them at any moment. And these conditions along with the destructive effects of the government's insane war result in mankind stooping to its lowest level, such as decimating a village of people in the manner of My Lai.
The combat scenes are viscerally rigorous and well staged, but the odd thing about seeing this film as a veteran of that war is how watered down the atrocities now seem: scenes of dead bodies, both US and VC, lying on the ground or being scooped into mass burials ignores the fact that in reality what would have been seen are strewed body parts, unrecognizably torn by booby traps, mines, and powerful gunfire.
But there is only so much the public can tolerate and so the film must be tidied up a bit. The impact remains in the eyes of the actors called upon to recreate the veterans. Stone does his best to show the insanity of war, a statement as powerful as any that war must not be the answer in today's world. And we haven't learned. And that is what this viewer is remembering. Grady Harp