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‘Platoon’ director createspoignant, gripping pictureBody bags and butchery. Dope. Rape and murder.In “Platoon,” screenwriter-direc-tor Oliver Stone has created a poignant picture of brutality ana man’s inhumanity to man.Whatever images of evil your mind can conjure up, Stone has a fix on them in his painful saga of the Vietnam War.But in presenting his creation for the screen, Stone is sure to draw fire from those who see his great dark epic as a cheapened and distorted version of the American experience in Southeast Asia.Is the director trying to pass off one platoon’s behavior as representative of all GIs in America’s longest and most difficult war?In 1967, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a college dropout, enlists and joins a platoon in Vietnam. Taylor’s battle is with reality, with finding out who the enemy is — the North Vietnamese, his comrades or himself.Taylor’s conflict is mirrored in the feud of two of the platoon’s leaders: Sgt. Elias (Willem DaFoe) and Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger). The two sergeants’ conflict is the epitome of good versus evil.Elias is the embodiment of the platoon’s conscience, while Barnes is the personification of evil, a murderous demon bent on leading the men to death and decay.Furthermore, the inner conflict of the platoon is an echo of a dissenting America over Vietnam.Supurb camera work captures the confusion and anguish of the GIs under enemy fire as they struggle for day-to-day survival. Fast-paced chase scenes through the tangled, suffocating foliage are exhausting.The director uses one year in the life of Chris Taylor as a metaphor for the American experience in the war. Stone is to be praised for the film’s realism, intensity and honesty, though some might say the movie belittles those who foughtJohn BlankenshipStaff WriterGuest Reviewand died there.That’s probably because very few people who make movies or write reviews ever took the Vietnam tour. It has taken a decade for the American public to get a closer look at the fighting men in the jungle. Scenes of soldiers menacing villagers are reminiscent of TV news footage.After Taylor is wounded twice and eligible to leave the fighting, he boards a helicopter and thinks: “We found the enemy in us.” He then promises to try to do good in the world.In real life, America continues to struggle with the Vietnam question. Who is to blame? What did happen? The success of “Platoon” (just as did films before it like “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now”) promises a new wave of Vietnam War films to follow, for their target is the guilt-ridden American conscience.Poets will laud Stone’s picture as a masterpiece. Perhaps it makes the statement Americans have hungered for.Given the appalling behavior of this small platoon, some critics are bound to complain that Americans still are far from a sober appraisal of our defeat in Vietnam. Some will say that “Platoon” is the most repellent movie ever made.But I think every American should sit through it once — and politicians and Pentagon leaders twice.
Newspaper Details
Beckley Register Herald
Beckley, West Virginia, US
Fri, Feb 13, 1987
Page 21
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 15 Jan 2020
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