59. Platoon (1986)

Plot Intro

A platoon of American soldiers, led by Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) and consisting of Chris (Charlie Sheen), Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) and other interchangeable camouflaged men, engage in battle with Vietnamese soldiers and their own traumatised minds.

Paul says...

Here’s our second and final film dedicated to the Vietnam War, and it’s a marked improvement on The Deer Hunter. The 1978 Best Picture winner was a 3 hour slog through semi-improvised banter and a horribly racist depiction of the Vietnamese. Platoon, meanwhile, has several factors working in its favour. Namely, it’s far more bearable running time, and the fact that its written and directed by Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone. 

Stone wrote the film after his return from Vietnam in the early '70s. It was designed as a reaction against a pro-military, gung-ho war film called The Green Berets that the interminably patriotic John Wayne made. Stone was suffering from his own personal demons throughout the making of the film- and apparently had a PTSD-driven breakdown on set. He wanted to make a worm’s eye view of the war, and bloody hell he delivers that. The violence has been amped up- we see limbs blown off, stabbings, napalm burnings, and bombings. Stone put his entire cast through a gruelling boot camp regime, and filmed so naturalistically that the looks of exhaustion on the actors’ faces was genuine. Some even commented on how they started to feel more secure only if they had a gun in their hand. 

This is a depiction of Vietnam that is rendered far more accessible for modern audiences, something that The Deer Hunter struggled with. While '80s audiences may not have needed Vietnam explained to them, we do need this because Afghanistan and Iraq are far more fresh in our knowledge of world events. Platoon makes more of an effort to display the grit, the violence, the trauma and aggression of this terrible war.

But what Platoon has in tone and atmosphere, it lacks in plot and characterisation. Whatever story exists is pretty loose. There’s some tension around Tom Berenger’s murder of a Vietnamese citizen and Willem Dafoe’s intention to expose him. But it’s a simple plot executed without any real surprise or originality, and it feels like it’s been perfunctorily thrown in because Stone needed more dialogue scenes. The rest of the film is a lengthy string of battle scenes and redundant discussions about cannabis and vaginas. I didn’t identify.

Also, pretty much every character is the same aggressive, macho, traumatised animal as each other. Some have a stronger moral compass than others, but thats about it in terms of distinguishing them. We recently watched City of God, which had a similar level of violence and insight into gang warfare on the streets of Rio. But what made City of God so supremely powerful was it’s complex intertwining of stories and its clearly drawn characters. I understand that Stone is going for realism to display his personal experiences of the war, but City of God proves that putting in some fictionalisation and high drama won’t detract from a topical film’s integrity.

So Platoon works well as a gruelling documentary persuading me that life as a soldier is not a viable career option, but not so much as a piece of story-telling. The result is that it’s interesting, but not particularly involving.

Highlight

The first battle scene in which Charlie Sheen sees the Vietnamese soldiers slowly approaching in the dark but is so frozen with fear that he doesn’t wake up his sleeping companions. It’s very tense, and kicks off the film tremendously.

Lowlight

Charlie Sheen’s narration is totally unnecessary and full of the usual '80s platitudes. My favourite was “We weren’t just fighting the Vietnamese. We were fighting ourselves.” I might frame that and put it in my bathroom.

Mark

5/10

Doug says...

I don’t like war films. 

This is something that has become clear to me over the course of the project. To be clearer, I don’t like films that focus on war and solely talk about war, rather than use war as a backdrop against which to explore bigger, more interesting subjects. Take for instance Bridge over the River Kwai which can be argued as a war film, but actually is about one man’s obsessive nature and how this eventually brings about his downfall. 

Bridge kept coming to mind for me when watching this film actually. There were some scenes that could have been set in the same location, including a large dried up river bed, and yet Bridge was exceptional, telling a dark and absorbing story through its clever way of varying scenes from intense and fast-moving, to thoughtful and character-building. As Paul points out City of God did this too - never letting scenes drag on, and switching between scenes of peace and scenes of outright war by telling characters’ backstories or diverting briefly on tangents that broke up the scenes of fighting. 

Unfortunately Platoon makes no attempt at this. We are instead treated to interminably long battle scenes which are nearly pitch black and feature lots of loud crashing. There is no drive here to create memorable characters beyond the one ‘baddie’, and there’s an attempt to have a ‘battle for the new person’s soul’ storyline that falls flat before it’s even really got going. And most of all, it’s boring. I spent most of the film thinking about what to have for dinner and then watching cute videos of pigs on my phone. 

I wanted to be proved wrong - I wanted an out-and-out war film to entrance and engross me. But the fact is that war, without any context or storytelling, is just dull. There’s a crack team of actors here, including John C. McGinley, and all I could think about is their other work and how much more fun and interesting that is - and in McGinley’s case, how great he was as Doctor Cox in Scrubs. 

With this all said, I did get drawn in by fifteen minutes of it (roughly 1/8 of the running time). In a scene where the Americans invade a village and their astonishing brutality is explored by direct contrast against the Vietnamese villagers, we are actually as viewers drawn in to make a judgement. In this case it’s ‘god the Americans are just awful’. But at least for a short time, we are actively engaged, and see the two battling sides in clear daylight. 

This, I think, is my overall problem with war films of this ilk. By having long battle scenes and no real plot, it starts to feel gratuitous. It feels almost as if the writer and director just enjoy watching battle scenes and decided to loosely loop together a bunch of ‘Best Hits’. If films really explore the storylines of their characters, and use war as more of a backdrop, they instantly become more successful - take our very first film Wings, which actually drove real emotion by balancing the narrative with some scenes not set in the heart of the battleground. Here it is relentless, and by not varying anything, it becomes dull and I stopped watching. I’m now dreading watching The Hurt Locker as our next big war-focused film.  

Highlight

The scene where they invade the Vietnamese village seems like the film will go a different, better, way. Sadly it does not. 

Lowlight

If you’re going to do a war film, for god’s sake invest in some decent plot and characterisation. 

Mark

2/10