Another View Of War

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2011)

Oliver Stone wrote the story based upon his experiences as a U.S. infantryman in Vietnam to counter the vision of the war portrayed in John Wayne's The Green Berets entitled,Platoon.It stars Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen together with Forest Whitaker,Francesco Quinn,John C. McGinley,Richard Edson and Kevin Dillon.It is war film written and directed by Stone,which is the first of his Vietnam War trilogy, followed by Born on the Fourth of July; and Heaven & Earth.
Platoon is a brutally realistic look at a young soldier's tour of duty in Vietnam. Chris Taylor is a college student who quits school to volunteer for the Army in the late '60s. He's shipped off to Vietnam, where he serves with a culturally diverse group of fellow soldiers under two men who lead the platoon: Sgt. Barnes, whose facial scars are a mirror of the violence and corruption of his soul, and Sgt. Elias, who maintains a Zen-like calm in the jungle and fights with both personal and moral courage even though he no longer believes in the war. After a few weeks, Taylor begins to see the naïveté of his views of the war, especially after a quick search for enemy troops devolves into a round of murder and rape.
This movie excels in the sense that it is a grunt's-eye view of the war, touching on moral issues but focusing on the men who fought the battles and suffered the wounds. It resembles older war movies more than its Vietnam peers, as it mixes familiar elements of on screen battle with small realistic details: bugs, jungle rot, exhaustion, C-rations, marijuana, and counting the days before you go home together with a contemporary sensibility and the psychological effects it has brought to the soldiers involved.Also,the cast involved were brilliant in their performance.It is a masterpiece, once seen, will never be forgotten, and, at least for those who were not in Vietnam, will forever alter the way in which the war is considered.