Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Platoon is the fifty-ninth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. War is hell and it sure seems like the Academy likes to be reminded of that every so often. Big international conflicts leave scars on the societies wounded by them. No wonder the artists in the first half of the 20th century were so consumed by the fallout of the World Wars. Something was different with Vietnam though. A generation returned from a terribly bloody conflict with little to show beyond deep damage to their bodies and minds. One of those returning soldiers, Oliver Stone, took his experience and turned it into Platoon. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) enlisted into this war. Unlike many of his brothers in arms, he chose to come to Vietnam. He’s dropped into a divided group that have already experienced some disillusion with their mission. The titular platoon divides somewhat evenly between factions helmed by the cruel and brutal Staff Sargent Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the more compassionate and levelheaded Sargent Elias (Willem Dafoe.) Falling in with Elias, Taylor skirts death at the hands of the North Vietnamese, witnesses atrocities committed by his compatriots and a near civil war between his platoon’s factions. Having been in Vietnam himself, Stone is able to deliver a gritty, personal account of what it was like on the ground. That intimacy and unflinching depiction of the horrors of war becomes the greatest strength of Platoon. Plenty of films had depicted the torment endured by this generation of veterans, The Deer Hunter won an Oscar for it too, but few managed to do so with the piercing honesty of this one. Here is a story that is realistic about the atrocities committed by American soldiers and how it splintered their unit in the moment, their psyches beyond that. Stone’s refusal to let anyone off the hook combines wonderfully with the performances of a number of young actors who would go on to become icons of the screen. Sheen caries the lead role well, believably driven mad by what he witnesses. Berenger too provides an effectively menacing villain. It is Dafoe though, as is so often the case, who steals scene after scene. The moral center of Platoon, he embodies the ideal that none of these other soldiers can quite live up to. Where the film suffers is in its bluntness. Through narration, Sheen’s Taylor lays out the exact themes of the film for the audience. Rather than trust that the intensity and emotion of seeing these young men mentally and physically ravaged will translate, Stone hits on his ideas over and over, with increasing force. A structural choice that adds little depth to the spiky message but does make the whole thing feel more like a lesson than an immersive story. 7/10
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