Stone's Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (14 July 2009)

When we see films about fighting in WWII, we see bonding and camaraderie. When we see films about fighting in Vietnam, we see vindictiveness, rape, power plays and questionable loyalties. Filmed with a mixture of subjectivity, as we never leave the journey of the story's particular platoon, and objectivity, as Stone tracks with them from a distance through leaves and bushes, Platoon epitomizes the Vietnam experience. Stone may have based restless but controlled Charlie Sheen's Taylor character on himself, and the film may revolve around him- --and one or two long takes indeed do just so---yet his experience is deeply felt by all of the characters. As he becomes more and more hardened by his journey into the heart of war, Taylor finds himself brusquely wavering between those who gravitate fearfully toward Barnes, an indestructible and forbidding return to one's earliest primordial nightmares, played by Tom Berenger, whose acute perception communicates the intimidating feeling of Barnes' presence, and those who gravitate toward Elias, a sagacious and optimistic veteran, played with self-contained receptiveness by Willem Dafoe, whose compadres, similarly cool and detached, share his accepting aura. These two characters are rivals with every ounce of willingness to mortally conquer one another.
What are alluring are the clues Stone leaves of the ideologies of the two dominant men. The separate congregations of troops, killing time till plodding on the next scorching day, are introduced together consecutively, and again overlap each other before we again see them enmeshed with each other as a seemingly unified single platoon. Taylor is welcomed into a world of pot smoke, nostalgic tunes and philosophical aphorisms in Elias' hut, where Taylor's existential comfort finds itself going to rejuvenate. We later hear Elias say to Taylor, "I love the stars. There's no right or wrong in 'em. They're just there, man." Barnes, on the other hand, shares his quarters with men who escape no further from the ever-crystallizing reality of their situation than knocking back beers and playing endless rounds of claustrophobic card games. We see a Confederate flag and a Jesus shrine respective of two peripheral bunkmates here. None of them, at any rate, have any patience for understanding the enemy or the man fighting with them, only enough to digress into the kill-or-be-killed level of fear- and rage-fueled thought processes. So there we have it: the accepting mentor and the intimidating idol, the one who awaits and welcomes free association and the one who lethally forbids anyone to get, or happen to be, in his way, and thus disrespect him. The blue team and the red team, the never-ending Civil War blurring the distinctions from the nameless, faceless savages they must kill to survive. Indeed, there is seldom a certain, indisputable shot of an enemy soldier.
In other Vietnam films like Casualties of War, there is a characterization of good and evil cast upon certain characters who do despicable things outside the bounds of their duty and certain ones who react righteously to them. In Stone's inarguably most personal, semi- autobiographical work, we spend the first half hour coming to like several soldiers whom we, and Taylor, find to have monstrous sides once Barnes leads them into terrorizing an alleged Viet Cong village in what is considerably the most disquieting sequence. They are just like you and me. They are not just dramatized characters.
There is the invariable angst that any motion affords a coin-toss prospect between a protected place or a threatened one. This film easily being the peak profit of Stone's craftsmanship, he assembles his shots to exclude the notion that combat coalesces consistently. Rather than combat sequences in which lines are distinctly evoked, his battle sequences comprise 360 degrees: Any blast or fired round might be aimed at friend or enemy, and in the frantic urgency of combat, many of his soldiers never have a definite conception of precisely who they are shooting at, or why.
There is the music, not only the diverting jams of the era, but a romantically somber orchestral throughline which Stone places with instinctive wisdom. Georges Delerue's gentle, compliant and deceptively vulnerable score sneaks in and out of the periphery. Similarly, the receptive humanitarian zeal of Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings becomes a relentlessly emotive servant of the universal concerns awakened on screen.
Stone essentially implies the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam owing to tensions within its own forces and a disinclination to go all the way, which leaves one with the dreadful consequence that the measureless anguish and upheaval was for nothing. Stone was able to depict the abomination of war without ever stylizing them. Rather, the effect is all-encompassing chagrin, a generation lost in a conflict that it didn't actually believe in, a generation of young men fighting for a country that didn't truly regard very highly or have a procedure for what was really going on rapt in the jungles, within their own platoons. This was the story we needed to see. It would be the first in a trilogy of Vietnam War films from Stone which penetrated the bilious innards of the Vietnam predicament to present a succeeding generation of Americans and for all those who were alive then the reality and the underhandedness of such a war.