Platoon Review (1986)

Platoon Review (1986)
Director: Oliver Stone
Writer: Oliver Stone
Starring: Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, Kevin Dillon, Keith David, John C. McGinley, Johnny Depp
Release Date: December 19, 1986

Oliver Stone served two tours in Vietnam. He was wounded twice. He came home, watched Hollywood make Vietnam movies that he felt had absolutely nothing to do with what he’d experienced, and spent years trying to get his own version made. By the time Platoon was finally released in 1986 he’d been sitting on the screenplay for a decade. That’s ten years of waiting to tell the truth about something that happened to you, and the urgency of that is in every frame of the film.

Platoon isn’t a movie about strategy or generals or the political decisions that put American soldiers in Southeast Asia. It’s about what it felt like to be on the ground in that jungle, day after day, exhausted and scared and increasingly unsure what you were even fighting for. Stone knew exactly what that felt like and he made sure his cast did too, putting them through a genuine boot camp in the Philippine jungle before filming began. The authenticity shows.

Charlie Sheen plays Chris Taylor, a college kid from a comfortable family who volunteers for Vietnam because he feels guilty that poor kids are fighting a war while people like him sit in classrooms. He arrives and discovers almost immediately that his idealism has no place in this environment. What Sheen brings to the role is a kind of watchful bewilderment that works perfectly. He’s an observer in his own story for much of the film, and it keeps you anchored as everything around him gets progressively darker.

The engine of Platoon is the conflict between two sergeants who represent two completely different responses to the moral pressure of war. Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, is the man who still has his humanity intact, who maintains his sense of right and wrong even in circumstances designed to destroy both. Sergeant Barnes, played by Tom Berenger under prosthetic scarring that makes him look like something that survived things it shouldn’t have, is the man who decided a long time ago that morality is a luxury that gets you killed. Berenger is rather frightening in this film. Not in a theatrical way. In a very quiet, very still way that makes you feel like he could do anything at any moment and feel nothing afterward.

Both Berenger and Dafoe were nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards. Both deserved it. The fact that neither won tells you something about how the Academy worked that year.

The village sequence in the middle of the film is the point where Platoon separates itself from everything else in its genre. What happens there isn’t heroic. It isn’t even clearly explained or justified. It just happens, the way things happen in a war where the rules keep bending until they break, and Stone films it with a confrontational directness that doesn’t let you look away or feel comfortable. It’s one of the most difficult sequences in American cinema and it’s supposed to be.

Forest Whitaker, Kevin Dillon, Keith David, John C. McGinley — the ensemble here is exceptional all the way through the supporting cast. Johnny Depp turns up in one of his first film roles as Private Lerner, small but memorable. The entire cast went through Stone’s boot camp and it shows in how they carry themselves, how they move through the jungle, how they relate to each other. This isn’t a group of actors pretending to be soldiers. They look and feel like men who’ve been in that jungle for months.

Platoon won Best Picture and Best Director at the 59th Academy Awards, making Stone the first Vietnam veteran to win Best Director. It deserved both. Forty years later it still hits harder than most war films made since.

Platoon gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.