Berenger and Dafoe represent the evil and Heroism of war in this excellent film

Rating: 9/10 (13 February 2007)

The most common complaint i've heard about Platoon is its depiction of The two SGT's (willem Dafoe and tom Berenger). The two are polar opposites.Dafoe is the good-hearted Sgt. who takes the side of newcomer private (Charlie sheen). Tom Berenger's character is as cold-hearted as could be. Any possible way that oliver stone could make berenger's character hated by viewers, he did. An example of this is when berenger shoots one of the frantic Vietnamese women, and then you hear the screaming of her daughter and husband. It doesn't take long to see that Berenger is an undisguised monster.
Is this portrayal of these two characters exactly realistic? Probably not. I would hope there are very few soldiers as wicked as Berenger is in this movie. However, what is really important about this movie is not how realistic or unrealistic the characters are. The fact that dafoe and Berenger are so different could reflect the different feelings that some soldiers felt. Then again, this is an oliver stone film, so raw emotion, realistic or unrealistic is expected and naturally it adds to the feeling of sadness and tragedy that is displayed in the film.
There really is no war film that is entirely realistic. To me war films usually express certain exaggerations in order to emphasize something the film was trying to say about war. "The Deer Hunter", for example, is famous for its scenes of American soldiers playing Russian roulette while being held prisoner. There has never been any exact recording of this happening, but this game was trying to express the brutality of the war (personally i though Deer Hunter was a pretty weak movie overall, but that is a different discussion). In apocalypse now, the insanity of colonel kurtz, expresses some of the insanity of the Vietnam war. Overall Platoon is one of the best war films. It covers a very wide spectrum of war, but also it helps get the message across-that war is bad, whether or not this is always expressed realistically.