Platoon is a Film of Inspiring Empathy and Implacable Force!

Rating: 9/10 (20 December 2015)

There are no grandstanding heroics in Oliver Stone's 'Platoon'. No back-patting reassurances that the Vietnam War was ever remotely considered a noble cause. This film is an act of courage. Stone, the gutsy writer-director, records in a devastating barrage of images the relentless horror and the senseless carnage experienced by far too many Americans in Vietnam. The movie is, in fact, so emotionally powerful that you can practically feel the same gnawing fear that can bring out the savagery in the most decent young men. Platoon, to a large extent, is a replay of his own harrowing, wartime experiences - Stone was a medal-decorated former "grunt" who served with the 25th Infantry in Vietnam.
From the very first shot - where newly arrived troops recoil at the sight of body bags being loaded onto their returning plane - you plunge directly into a blazing jungle inferno. The film is structured as a Dantesque descent into hell, following the progress of a young foot soldier, Chris Taylor (a commendable Charlie Sheen), as he penetrates further and further into the blind terror that is his experience of the war. Chris, as Stone himself was, is a well-to-do college dropout who volunteered for Vietnam out of a sense of patriotism and a vague desire to prove himself as a man. He's expecting a WWII movie; what he finds instead is a nightmare. It's a war where there seems to be no master plan, no big picture and no advances. There is only terror, bone-deep exhaustion, nighttime patrols and the humid jungle, crawling with snakes, insects and the silent Viet Cong. This is, unquestionably, what Vietnam must have felt like to the foot soldiers.
The movie, with its hallucinatory, nightmarish visual quality, captures the moral confusion and the increasing disintegration of soldiers who escape by getting stoned together. This mercilessly intense movie is definitely not for the faint of heart. The atmosphere remains highly charged from beginning to end. There's no letup, nary a suggestion of humor to break the tension. It's not unlike an Indonesian shadow play in the sense that the evil god, scar-faced Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger, his face a road-map of scars, extremely dynamic as the fighting machine), collides head-on with his moral pole- a heroic God fearing man, the disillusioned Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe making a strong impression). There are images in Platoon so powerful that they seem, rather than simply imprinted on celluloid, to have been burned into memory. This bold combat movie projects Vietnam with such ferocity that no one can ever doubt that that war was indeed anything but a living hell.
Decades later, Platoon remains an intriguing blend of the political and the personal, with Stone turning his memories and his opinions about Vietnam into a potent drama. Platoon continues to be lauded as a film of inspiring empathy and implacable force!