overrated, get away from that it's an okay movie

Rating: Null/10 (1 May 2001)

That this movie won the best picture Oscar back in the eighties is utterly mystifying. At heart, it's a pretty basic war movie, but its pretensions are what causes it to fail. Oliver Stone has never been one for subtlety, but he might as well have had subtitles explaining what the symbolism was, since it is so obvious.
The movie is, in fact, about a platoon. It hasn't much to say about the Vietnam War itself--or the Viet Cong, or really the Vietnamese, since they're mostly background. The movie itself is about America, and how it dealt with the War, which is all well and good. But if this is supposed to be some sort of social statement, about the conflict in Vietnam, and how wrenching the war was for American society, Stone really oughtn't to have been so mindlessly simplistic about this platoon.
The good and evil parts are almost parodies, at best comic book characters; most war movies are about the good guys versus the bad guys. Nothing wrong with that. But if this is a movie that's supposed to rise above the rest and be taken as a "serious" movie, something a bit more nuanced and complex is required. Stone offers up stereotypes instead: We have the platoon in a virtual civil war, with the southern Jack Daniels swilling, country music rednecks led by scarred Tom Berenger on one side, and representing evil; and the "good" guys led by Willem Dafoe, as drug addled peaceniks, including all the blacks.
This is in some fashion supposed to offer Charlie Sheen, the empty center of this movie, a choice between two poles, but he's never conflicted, he clearly moves into Dafoe's circle from the beginning. And the rest of the movie is just a standard war movie. Again, nothing wrong with that, Stone can use a camera pretty well, and the soundtrack, a little standard but okay, works. All in all a mediocre movie sunk by trying to be something that it isn't.
Try out "Hamburger Hill" instead, or possibly "The Boys In Company C", for something a little more interesting about Vietnam.