It was a launch pad

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2005)

Probably because I'm not American and certainly because I'm not young, I find it hard to feel much empathy with characters seeped in American street culture. In consequence the film left me stone (sorry Ollie) cold sober at the beginning. A bit like the whole of Apocalypse Now. Soldiers swear and get doped, they're incomprehensible, ill breed and ugly. When they get blown to smithereens and blood flows, arms come off and characters scream and screech, all I feel is yeah, yeah, yeah, if you learnt some decent human values maybe I would care that you're suffering. And then came the sequence in the Vietnamese village and that really got to me. Outrage and anger, and did they really murder and crush like that, but it's not that simple, were the villagers harbouring the enemy, and so on. It's the best film I've seen on the Vietnam war, although I've yet to see Full Metal Jacket. I score 8/10.
Anyway ... The reason for me writing a comment is that it occurs to me that there's a similarity between The Magnificent Seven and Platoon. In the same way that Seven consolidated the careers of a number of young 1960s film actors (Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn), Platoon deepened the careers of a number of young 1980s film actors (Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, John C. McGinley, Johnny Depp). For that reason alone, Platoon was a milestone (sorry Ollie).