We didn't fight the enemy we fought ourselves, and the enemy was in us

Rating: 8/10 (21 August 2004)

****SPOILERS**** "Platoon" is every bit as powerful an anti-war movie like "All Quite on the Western Front" the film is unlike that 1930's anti-war classic. Where the hero was eager to enter the war and fight and die for his country and felt that the war was justified. The hero in "Platoon" Pvt. Chris Taylor, Charlie Sheen, had no doubt at all about the war that he entered as a green replacement in the battered and bloodied Bravo Company 25th Infantry. Chris felt that the war in Vietnam was a necessary evil at best or an unnecessary waste of lives, American and Vietnamese, at worse.
Volunteering for combat duty Chris felt that as a more or less privileged young American he had to pull his own weight and not stay out of the service of his country at it's time of need and dropped out of collage, were he was safe from being drafted for military service, to do that. During his time serving in one of Bravo company's platoons Chris realized that not only was he at war with the dreaded and deadly North Vietnamese regular soldiers and Vietcong troops and guerrilla fighters he was at war with the men in his own platoon as well as himself.
Graphically violent as well as penetratingly thought-provoking Vietnam War film by director Oliver Stone that not only shows the war in Vietnam but any war for what it really is: Hell On Earth. Were given the story of the actions of the Bravo Company platoon from the thoughts and writings of young Pvt.Chris Taylor that takes place from the late summer of 1967 to around the time of the Tet offensive in January to March 1968. Which witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting in the war.
By the end of the movie Chris' platoon was cut to pieces in a series of ambushes night attacks and fire fights and finally a major North Vietnamese assault that breached Bravo company's forward perimeter in the Vietnamese jungle. The enemy forces overran and virtually wiped out the entire infantry company which was saved, in a last act of desperation, by a USAF bombardment of it's own positions. The film shows that war, no matter how right or wrong it is, dehumanizes and brutalizes all those involved in it.
We see Chris who went from an innocent young man who never fired a shot in anger, if at all, before he entered the US military to a hardened and cold-blooded killer in the less then six months that he was in Vietnam. There's also a powerful story between the two sergeants who ran the platoon that Chris was in. Sgt. Elias Grodin, Willem DaFoe, and Staff/Sgt. Bob Barnes, Tom Berenger. The two seemed to be more at war with each other then with the enemy Vietcong and NVR. Sgt. Grodin was on the sensitive side who tried to keep at least some of his humanity in light of the madness swirling all around him and was by far the most likable person in the movie. Staff/Sgt. Barnes was a horribly scared psychotic killer who took no prisoners, military or civilian, and was both feared and hated by almost everyone in his platoon.
As brutal as Staff/Sgt. Barnes was he never the less motivated his men to fight and survive in the savage jungle combat that they encountered all through the film. It was Staff/Sgt. Barnes brutish treatment of innocent Vietnamese civilians that the platoon came in contact with that split the two, Barnes & Grodin, up into enemy camps.
In one of the most gripping scenes in the movie when Sgt. Grodin was lost in the jungle after an enemy ambush he's spotted by Staff/Sgt. Barnes. You can see by the look in Sgt. Grodin's eyes how happy he is to see him and you get the impression that they'll both make up and bury the hatchet and once again become friends. Yet just by looking in the crazed stare coming out of Staff/Sgt. Barnes eyes you, and Sgt. Grodin, knew that was not to happen as he put a barrage of slugs into Grodin's chest from his M16.
"Platoon" is one of those movies about war that really hits the nail on the head about the horrors of war and that the most righteous of all wars are those wars that are never fought at all.