Platoon

Oliver Stone, USA 1986, 120 minutes

An Oliver Stone film without a conspiracy theory? Well not a big one anyway. This is instead a highly personal view of the atrocities of war as seen through the eyes of a young, raw recruit (Charlie Sheen).

Torn between the discipline required by the army, in the form of his unit commander (Tom Berenger) and his slipping grasp on humanity, which remains in his idolisation of the maverick Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), he is plunged into the thick of the action and is forced to make personal choices. As both conflicts continue, wills crumble and emotions escalate until everything collides in one almighty explosion of violence, betrayal and agony.

The first and best of Stone's vaunted `Nam Trilogy (and shot back to back with the grittily excellent Salvador), this is the director at his peak without the flashy camerawork and editing or the convoluted scripts which have weighed down his recent work. Only sheer raw energy and emotion emerge from this film and the superb cast and the viewer cannot help but be affected by this onslaught on the senses.

"Savage, yet moving... Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesom power" - Time Out

Review by Neil Chue Hong
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97

Following Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Platoon successfully continues the US meditation on the Vietnam war. As with the previous two, it combines horrifying imagery and strong characters but it still remains vulnerable to narrow ideology.

Platoon records the events in the life of a 19-year old soldier (Charlie Sheen) in Vietnam as he is immediately thrown into the bloody experience of combat. The youngster's confrontation with the chaos of war is reinforced as he becomes caught in a menacing confrontation between two sergeants - ruthless Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Elias (Willem Dafoe) whose survival instincts have not stripped him of all sense of human dignity.

Stone depicts with uncompromising realism the coldblooded crimes committed in the claustrophobic tropical jungles of Viemam but the result is often ambiguous. The massacre of a Vietnamese village and the transformation of the American soldiers to total beasts is gripping but it falls prey to Stone's didactic style. What is more problematic is the voyeuristic treatment of war by Stone's otherwise sensitive camera. For example, the sequence which captures Elias, aims at conveying death as being heroic; this points to the manipulative nature of the film which one has to admit is skilfully concealed through Stone's attempt to provide simultaneously some sort of social criticism. Despite these flaws, Stone conjures up some legendary sequences that will set your eyes on fire and he fully develops the three central characters. The performances by the all-male cast are exemplary, and the elegiac tone of the film reaches its peak with a gloriously composed score.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94