Platoon (1986)

Oliver Stone’s film Platoon was advertised as "The first real movie about Vietnam." I would say this is true for a couple of reasons: First off Platoon is a movie about the experience of the ‘grunts’ on the ground, written and directed by a man who had been one of those grunts. There had been movies about these guys before but either they were largely propagandistic like the John Wayne helmed The Green Berets, or stylized like The Deer Hunter or Francis Ford Coppala’s Apocalypse Now. In addition none of these film makers had ground combat experience in Nam, and thus for all there talent or sincerity, they would never be able to capture the essence of the place the way that a talented veteran could. In Platoon you feel like your getting the essence of that experience (link ment to be ironic).

The film follows the titular platoon over the course of several months in the field from late 1967 into 1968. The young men who play the youthful solders read like a variable who’s who of the up and comers of Hollywood in the 80's, including Charlie Sheen, John C. McGinnley, Forrest Whitaker, and for perhaps two minutes or so, Johnny Depp. At first the experience is a tense monotony, but when you get to the sequence at the village (the turning point of the story), there is a sheer terror that strikes you with an intensity so great, as to be almost unfamiliar to your pervious movie going experience. You are put in a place where you come to understand why massacrers happen. The frightened young men divide, half appear heartless, half profoundly disturbed, the test of their humanity is given. Things spiral from there, the solders come out of that experience bitterly divided, beginning a veritable "civil war within the platoon", as Charlie Sheen’s character describes it in a letter to his grandmother. To borrow the title from a more recent feature, you know that by the end ‘There Will Be Blood’ spilt between these brothers in arms. The metaphor of Vietnam being for Americans a fight with ourselves, becomes expressed in a literalistic yet believable way, producing a breath taking piece of film making. Four ½ out of Five.