Decent but not very provocative

Rating: 7/10 (28 November 2007)

I am very interested about wars and the movies about them and I must say I had pretty high expectations for Platoon. I was hoping that this would be the ultimate Vietnam-war movie, with all that it takes, with a mature yet challenging view of the reality of war.
Wellit wasn't bad but I definitely expected more.
My first sensation after I finished watching was this sense of surprise. I actually can't say I have learned anything new from Platoon. It struck me as a too predictable and due to that not very convincing. Yeah, I knew people were killed in wars, I knew that there were atrocities, I knew some were accepting them and some weren't- what I lacked was some kind of higher self-consciousness of the characters, some above-average assessment and assimilation of the things, because this movie seemed like a bunch of robot guys acting, doing the first thing that came into their minds, everything happening exactly the way you think it would.
This takes me to my second point- I really felt that some of the "explanations", or ideas were stereotypes or lacked substance. Like the letter in the beginning: with "this place feels like hell", or with the lines about duty for your countryI don't know, I'm no veteran, but this doesn't sound very realistic to me. What was again very freak, Bunny killing that guy, or Barnes shooting the woman- it is supposed to show the degrading effects of war, but I can't look to it just like that. Those guys, especially Bunny, would have probably been psychos outside the war; their attitude is not one war can explain, it's a lot sicker than that. OK, we can understand that war brings out the worst in a human being or that it offers the place for otherwise restrained sick behaviors - yet as an other commenter on IMDb put it, too many things happen to that small platoon in a very short period. Of course movie time is limited, but this way we might get the wrong idea about that war.