Platoon

 

In 1967, Oliver Stone enlisted in the United States Army and requested combat duty in Vietnam. He would go on to serve his country in that hotly debated war for seventeen months in a variety of posts before being discharged and sent back home. He learned firsthand what it was like to be a callow youth in a war zone filled with barely trained soldiers, most of whom were poorly educated and didn’t sign up for this. In most cases, the Vietnam War was populated by soldiers who were drafted and sent into Southeast Asia unprepared and ill-suited for what they were about to get involved in. 

Vietnam was a different kind of war than those America participated in in the past. World War I and II were terrible wars filled with the death of millions, but they were viewed as a fight against evil, and there was a lot of political grandstanding in favor of our troops being over there defending our freedoms, beliefs shared by the majority of American citizens. That was not the case with Vietnam, with the prevailing opinion being that we shouldn’t be there at all and it was a waste of the lives of our young. There was little patriotic motivation to volunteer for this war which is why so many people had to be drafted, and many who came from rich or connected families did whatever they could to avoid that draft. That being said, it’s a common misconception that volunteers were rare. Even with the war being looked at so poorly, there were still plenty of people who felt it was their duty to serve. 

Oliver Stone felt that the war movies of the time weren’t adequately depicting the real experiences that he observed while he was in Vietnam. Films like The Green Berets  celebrated America’s involvement in Vietnam, and The Deer Hunter, a far more pessimistic film, focused more on the psychological damage of soldiers coming home. Oliver Stone wanted to make a film based on the actual war itself and what it was like for the soldiers being thrown into the jungles and having to discover who you were in one of the most extreme environments you could possibly imagine. 

The film follows Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a soldier who volunteered for a tour in Vietnam who has just arrived in the country and has been assigned to an infantry platoon near the Cambodian border. The platoon is officially commanded by the young and inexperienced Lieutenant Wolf (Mark Moses), but the soldiers under him defer to two of the older, more experienced subordinates: Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe). Barnes is a hard-nosed, cynical soldier who has become calloused from his time in the war, whereas Elias has more compassion for his fellow soldiers and the people they are here to defend. Throughout the course of the next two hours, we will see a series of missions, successful and otherwise, as well as how the war alters their perceptions of each other. When the film begins, there is a pretty clear division along racial lines in the platoon, but by the end, that has dissolved away, and they are all just fellow men. We also see a blurring of the lines of morality, where initially things are looked at as black and white but will eventually blend into shades of gray. 

Taylor begins the film wide-eyed and innocent, not fully aware of what he has gotten himself into. This is a film about him growing out of that innocence into a jaded individual, one who will shoot a superior in cold blood. The film will spend two hours building up the evidence in support of that decision so that when it happens, we are 100% behind that decision and rightfully so. Barnes is a good soldier, well aware of the dangers all around them, and he does things that prevent his men from getting killed. But he is also a terrible human being who has grown cold and unfeeling when it comes to the true cost of the war and is willing to kill his own men without good cause. Platoon asks us to examine Taylor’s situation in the moment and ask ourselves what is the right decision: pull the trigger or let Barnes live. Either choice can be seen as the right or the wrong one. 

People have been quick to dismiss Chris Taylor as being an atypical soldier because he was one of the ones who volunteered for the duty and was not forced to be there. This accusation was especially prevalent amongst actual Vietnam vets, many of whom felt their own experience was not being portrayed on screen. To be fair, this was based on Oliver Stone’s personal experience in Vietnam, and to tell it otherwise would be to cheapen his own experiences and not accurately replicate them. I have talked to several Vietnam vets over the years and was surprised to find that many of them cannot and will not watch this, or any, war movie because it reawakens PTSD in them, memories, and experiences that they have tried to bury and forget. One thing I have heard on more than one occasion when referring to Platoon specifically is that it is easy to make a moral judgment over the actions of the soldiers from the comfort of your living room. Choices are not quite so simple when in the heat of war. Even though we rarely see the bad side of our soldiers in films about World War II, The Civil War or even the American Revolution, atrocities were done by our soldiers in those wars, too. This sentiment has been repeated from several different people, and I tend to believe it. I’ve never served in the military or fought in a war and cannot speak for myself on this subject, but I can see why so many of these young men came home and refused to ever talk about what happened there.

Charlie Sheen is an odd choice to lead this film. He’d been around for a little while at this point and had not yet earned the reputation he now has, but he was hardly an experienced actor, and it shows. When tasked to dig deep and convey the type of emotions someone like Chris Taylor would be going through, he just cannot do it. This isn’t ruinous, but it does make it more of a struggle to get drawn into his character. It doesn’t help that he is being upstaged by virtually everyone else here. Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe were both experienced acting veterans at this point and really make you feel the intensity of the jungle and the stakes of the war. Charlie Sheen, on the other hand, feels only slightly better than a kid playing war in the backyard. Even the many colorful characters that make up the rest of the platoon are more interesting to watch than Sheen. 

This movie may shock people, especially people who didn’t live through these times and saw firsthand the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Those who did, needed a way to process their feelings about the experience and come to terms with what they did while they were over there. Oliver Stone chose to do so by writing and directing a movie about those experiences through the medium of film, sharing experiences he may not have been able to just sit down and discuss. The experience for those of us watching it after the fact is sometimes unpleasant, often shocking, and at times outright depressing. But it is also riveting and emotional and makes for a compelling experience that would have been hard to pull together without that real-world experience that Stone had. He told the story of the war here, and three years later, he would tell the story of those who returned home. That film, Born on the Fourth of July, is just as matter-of-fact about the challenges the men faced after coming home from the war and, in some ways, is just as hard to watch.

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Arnold Kopelson (won)

Best Director: Oliver Stone (won)

Best Supporting Actor: Tom Berenger

Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe

Best Original Screenplay: Oliver Stone

Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson

Best Film Editing: Claire Simpson (won)

Best Sound: John K. Wilkinson, Richard Rogers, Charles “Bud” Grenzbach, and Simon Kaye (won)

____________________________________________________

Release Date: December 19, 1986

Running Time: 120 minutes

Rated R

Starring: Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, and Willem Dafoe

Directed By: Oliver Stone