The first casualty of war IS innocence.

Rating: 8/10 (16 September 1999)

It didn't take long for Oliver Stone to make a name for himself. Beginning with his Oscar-winning script for "Midnight express", he has continued making great scripts and movies all along the years. However, not that many people knew him or followed his career even after he won that Oscar except for his biggest fans. So "Platoon" could be considered to be his breakthrough movie and not only because it won Oscars for best picture and a best director one for him, but because it was really good.

Chris (Charlie Sheen) has dropped out of college to volunteer for the army to go to Vietnam. But once he gets there, he realizes that the war really isn't how he thought it might be. He sees the horrors of the war and lives them as well. Also, there are two sergeants in his platoon and they are complete opposites; Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a crazy man who kills any Vietnamese person as soon as he or she is in site. And then there is Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) who is completely against the war and probably wouldn't be there if he had a choice. And so there is this hate rivalry between Barnes and Elias. Barnes even goes as far as killing Elias in a very cowardly way.
Throughout the movie, there is Sheen's voice-over telling his experiences with the intermediate of letters he writes to his grand-mother. The movie is a biography of Stone's experience in Vietnam and you can see how he just hated the war and considered it incredibly stupid. The scenes in the Vietnamese villages are very powerful and the whole movie is very well directed. I think that it's Berenger who steals the movie however with his excellent incarnation of the crazy Sergeant Barnes. Globally, this is an exceptional movie and even though it's very rough and a little gory sometimes, I still recommend it to any movie-buff who hasn't yet seen it. It IS exceptional.