A review

Rating: 10/10 (9 December 2000)

`Somebody once wrote: Hell is the impossibility of reason.' That's what this place feels like: Hell.'
So Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) writes home after experiencing combat in Vietnam. What makes Oliver Stone's account of the Vietnam War so remarkable is the depiction of that complete lack of reason. This is not a war where the lines of battle are distinctly drawn. The fighting overlaps itself. We see soldiers surrounded on all sides while sleeping. We see American bombers attacking their own troops after a miscalculation in coordinates. We see a Vietcong soldier strapped with explosives run into a tent filled with officers. We see the war for how it must have been: total chaos. Confusion permeates scenes of brutality. No one in the film knows what is going on. Why are they fighting? How do they end up here? Will they die in the next battle?
These questions are at the heart of Platoon. There is no real plot to the film and to try to describe one is demeaning to the film's content. I will only say a major theme of the film is conflict. However, it is not only the conflict between two armies fighting for two distinct causes, but also the conflict among the soldiers on how to fight. The `why' of fighting never comes into play, because there is no reason to ask `why' they are fighting. The soldiers are as confused as the civilians are. At one point, the platoon is surprised to learn they have crossed into Cambodia.
The lines of combat are drawn within the American troops as well. There is a conflict of conscience. The sides are very distinct, and the leaders are as different as two men can be. The first, Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), is a scarred, war-torn man, who, at one point, kills an innocent woman to force her husband to talk. The second, Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), is a kind, concerned man who stops Barnes from massacring the entire village. As the film progresses and we see the chaos continue, we know that these two men represent, in completely general terms, good and evil. By the end of the film, Chris will have learned from both these men, and we see his education progress throughout the story. One minute he shoots at the feet of a crippled civilian to make him dance and the next stops a gang rape.
There is social conflict, also, among the troops. Chris is an enlisted soldier, one of the few among a platoon of drafted men. They express their disgust with a system that filters out the poor and uneducated to fight and die in place of the privileged. Race is another qualification in the draft, and the African-American soldiers state hatred for the system also. No one in the film wants to be in Vietnam. Even Chris who signed up knows he has made a terrible mistake the instant he steps off the helicopter.
Stone argues that evil won the war. The complete confusion lead to chaos, and in this chaos, the war was fought and lost. This loss was not military, political, or social, but moral.
At the end of the film, Chris says that those who made it out of Vietnam have an obligation `to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.' After what we have seen occur in the film, it is almost impossible to believe that any of them will find these things. It is this fact that makes the film utterly heartbreaking.