A classic film?

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2007)

Willem Dafoe is outstanding in this film as he usually is in most of the work he has done. Forrest Whittaker, Kevin Dillon and Johnny Depp are enjoyable to watch as well simply because they are so darn young. I have read about the war in Vietnam extensively and according to friends of mine who served in that war Platoon gives the best depiction of the environment, uniforms, customs etc... of the time. Unfortunately, although Stone had a lot of the right ingredients to make a war film classic including funding and personal experience, he fell short in my opinion due to the final scenes of the film. As he so often does, Oliver Stone touched on a serious issue but did not have the guts to delve into it as he did in Born on the Fourth of July. The scenes reminiscent to the public of the My Lai massacre are sugar coated. Sheens character somehow turns from being a sniveling preppie private into a VC killing Captain America by the end of the movie. While I'm sure there have been cases of extreme heroism such as that,I felt the way the character metamorphed into a larger then life hollywoodesque Rambo was extremely unbelievable. It took away from the momentum of the film. It probably would have been better to kill off Sheen because in reality that is what would have happened. Anyway, I respect Stone for his politics and for well, some of his films anyway Alexander and Any Given Sunday excluded, but if only he had stuck to his guts and made a war movie with a little more realism then Platoon would most certainly be a great war film classic.