Something from Ecclesiastes

Rating: 5/10 (27 March 2016)

So it seems to me that the ideals of Platoon are to be anti-war...to not ascribe any blame towards the overtly political powers that drove this war but to centre it on the human aspect of the soldier itself, and how it loses its humanity. Sheen's bleary, self-serious voice- over narration says so as much - that the enemy was within themselves, the violence from their own hearts. And Stone collaborates this idea with his visuals; there is scarcely a clear shot of a Vietnamese soldier, guns blazing. The danger is all around them, but it is murky and indistinct, and the paranoia settles into the platoon quite easily, and begins to affect them. There is no logic or reason to the madness, to the hysteria of the violence, to the casual beckoning of death itself after a few weeks in the jungle.
The problem is that Sheen's storyline doesn't fit this message at all. Stone tries to avoid pointing the blaming finger, and attempts to rid the film of any structure or cause or journey just because we might expect it from a movie. But in doing so he inadvertently creates a coming-of-age story that just so happens to be set during the Vietnam War. Taylor goes in a fresh-faced youth, having idealised the soldier life and cast away the bores of college, and immediately finds himself out of his depth. And then he has to go through the usual rigours of gaining acceptance within the group and finding his feet, and shaping his own philosophy. The choice that Stone has presented here is a insultingly simplistic one; the scarred, savage Barnes who shoots first and asks questions later, who Taylor unsurprisingly initially worships and who has half of the platoon following his violent, racist ways. And then you have the literal hippie, Dafoe's disillusioned, goody two-shoes veteran that later befriends Taylor and stops the atrocity at the village.
There's not much engagement even for Taylor - one moment he is deliriously taunting the villager with his gun and even close to shooting him, and following that, nearly speaks out on the massacre and then stops the gang-rape of some girls. Stone wants these moral decisions to be grounded within visceral, graphic images of war, but doesn't commit to it; the rape is only hinted at from off-screen, and as Bunny smashes the elderly woman's head open, it surely is a sight for Taylor to recoil from, but we don't see it. Even when the group discover the gory end of Manny, Stone spends more time pointing the camera at the horrified reactions instead.
Many critics have praised it for its realism, its fuzzy, indistinct boundaries of warfare that do not glorify the combat, do not make it exhilarating but chaotic and confusing for all involved. But Stone's film is full of these cinematic moments that betray his intent - Sheen's cliché-ridden voice-over becomes quickly insufferable because it assumes so much of the other characters without ever giving evidence of their "heat and soul". There's that wishy-washy poetic speech from Dafoe the night before the chaos and mayhem that just happens to take place underneath a beautiful star-filled sky and a stupid shooting star. Later he is the figure of perhaps the worst scene in the film, his own death, stumbling for his life as he is riddled with Vietnam bullets in slow-motion and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings swells to peak sentimentality and it's almost unwatchable.