Classic Movie Review: Platoon

Best Picture: #59
Original Release Date:  February 6, 1987
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours
Director: Oliver Stone

Quick Impressions:
Just because I watched Platoon with my twelve-year-old does not mean you should watch Platoon with your twelve-year-old.  This is a disturbing film that might traumatize children (or even adults).  I’ll talk more about that later, but I wanted to be sure I didn’t give anybody who hasn’t seen the movie the wrong impression of its content.  With this film, it’s not a question of “how pervasive is the bad language?” or even “how gruesome is the violence?”.  Both the film’s themes and the typical behavior of its characters are genuinely disturbing, and many parents might not want their children to watch Platoon.  Know your child.

Since it’s pre-Code, Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front also gives the audience a legitimately disturbing depiction of war.  When we watched that film last summer (near the beginning of our project), we were surprised by the graphic, visceral violence.  Like Platoon, All Quiet on the Western Front is also anti-war propaganda.  (Note, I’m not saying that I disagree with the film’s agenda, just pointing out that it has one.)  I personally felt that All Quiet on the Western Front beat us over the head with its message a bit too emphatically and repetitively.  (But I’ll admit, when that movie came out in 1930, audiences hadn’t spent their junior year of high school reading a bunch of literature by Lost Generation writers like I had.)

Because of All Quiet on the Western Front, my daughter thought she knew what to expect from an anti-war film like Platoon.  There’s a key difference between those two films, though.  In All Quiet on the Western Front, the young soldiers are presented in a pretty sympathetic light.  Yes, they’re manipulated by war mongers in their country, betrayed by their government and their society, constantly in mortal peril as they endure enemy attacks without proper provisions or leadership.  But in that film, the shocking aspect is that they are young German soldiers (our enemies) presented in a sympathetic light as victims.  In Platoon, the characters are also manipulated, betrayed, beset, and lacking in leadership.  But this time the shock is that they are American soldiers (ourselves) presented in an unsympathetic light as predators and torturers.  In All Quiet on the Western Front, the enemy is just as human as we are.  In Platoon, we are just as capable of inhuman brutality as the enemy.  It’s similar in concept but alarmingly different to experience as a viewer.

The Good:
The film Titanic is often described as a romance hidden inside an action movie (or vice versa).  And I think Platoon offers us something similar if we watch carefully.

If this movie were an essay, we’d get the thesis statement in the conclusion when Charlie Sheen’s character, Chris Taylor, sums up his experience in Vietnam by saying, “I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy.  We fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us.”

When he said that, I told my daughter with relief, “Oh good!  I did understand the movie!”

Chris goes on, “The war is over for me now, but it will always be there for the rest of my days, as I’m sure Elias will be fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called possession of my soul. There are times since, I’ve felt like the child born of those two fathers.”

“That doesn’t sound like a happy marriage!” my daughter observed, totally cracking me up.

But her jokes aside, how Chris frames his experiences for us is quite telling. 

At one moment as we watched Platoon, I realized I had no idea what the soldiers’ actual objective was.  I said to my daughter in bemusement, “It looks like they’re already doomed and walking on, waiting to die one by one.”

Later I realized that probably wasn’t just some freak thought I was having.  That’s probably exactly the feeling the film wants to convey.  Without proper leadership, the U.S. soldiers are essentially wandering around in despair, already doomed because they’re fighting a nightmarish war (without clear objectives) that they can’t possibly win.

Chris doesn’t even understand what is happening to him in Vietnam.  That’s why everything is so chaotic and confusing to watch.  Chris is our guide through this story, and that’s the way it seems to him, too.  But in stark contrast to the bewildering military events, there’s one plotline that’s extremely easy to follow, the power struggle (that Chris observes and highlights for us) between Sergeant Elias (a highly sympathetic Willem Dafoe) and Sergeant Barnes (an increasingly terrifying Tom Berenger).  This story is not very Vietnam specific.  It could happen in any era.  It could even be successfully told under the Hays Code.  Imagine it as a classic movie.  Instead of Willem Dafoe, think of Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne.  The tormented man of conscience (who loathes his situation) stands up to his dangerous, power-hungry colleague (who delights in abusing his power).  Meanwhile, the young soldier looking for a role model watches them and considers what kind of man he wants to become.  This is an old story.  Throw out the existing setting, and you’ll see it could work just fine in ancient Rome, the Old West, the high seas.  The where and when don’t matter.  The human drama is not only captivating; it’s extremely familiar.

I think this happens because nothing has prepared Chris for the horrors he experiences in Vietnam.  As a young American, he never expected war to be like this.  He grew up considering himself virtuous and mentally preparing to serve his country by being a hero.  Nothing has prepared him for the horrors of what he experiences in Vietnam.  But I’ll bet he’s seen a lot of movies.

As I see it, Chris manages to endure the psychological torture of the unexpected reality of war by conceiving of his experiences within the framework of what he’s always believed going to war ought to be.  He can’t make any sense of what’s happening to him.  So he finds a way to make it make sense.  I’m not saying he’s imagining the events of the movie.  I’m saying that amidst the chaos, he’s focusing on the moments he finds comprehensible.  There’s clearly a crisis of leadership.  But Chris still finds a good man to look to for guidance, Sgt. Elias.  When Sgt. Elias dies (as so many of the others around him do), it can’t possibly be a senseless act of violence because that is too awful.  No.  The villain has murdered him.  And when Chris decides to kill a certain character late in the film, it’s not because the horrors of the environment have gotten to him, making him a killer, too.  It’s because he’s avenging the death of the fallen hero. 

After all, what has Chris accomplished in Vietnam?  The military victories of his fellow soldiers don’t amount to much.  They’re always being hunted and killed.  They torture some villagers, torch the village, commit a few other unspeakable atrocities.  They never achieve much of anything.  But in his own mind, Chris is able to return home a hero because he has killed the villain and avenged the death of his fallen mentor.  I’m not saying Chris is delusional.  I’m saying he’s processing the chaotic events around him using the only tools he’s been given by his American upbringing.  I’m not suggesting that the events Chris relays to us aren’t really happening.  I’m just calling attention to what he chooses to stress.  Platoon is like a Hollywood war movie sustaining the young protagonist through the harsh, unexpected reality of actual war.

For the first half hour or so of the film, my daughter treated me to so many jokes that I worried our experience of Platoon would be like the one we see in The Naked Gun.  (You know where Frank and Jane walk out of the theater laughing hysterically, and then we see that the movie they’ve been watching is Platoon.)  She found Chris’s tendency to write letters (mentally) to his grandma very amusing and started talking to “Grandma” herself, commenting on every scene, making a joke of every single thing that she possibly could.  (And she was actually quite funny.  I could barely breathe.)  But after the first enemy ambush, she stopped laughing.  And when the scene with the village came, she actually had to close her eyes for quite a while.  Eventually, she moved over to lean against me.  I even worried that maybe we shouldn’t finish the movie together (but she protested so indignantly that I did let her watch the rest).

The events of this movie are dark, and the audience is supposed to find them disturbing.  Even before the worst of the atrocities, my daughter found the American soldiers’ general conduct less than admirable.  When there’s time for recreation, the soldiers split into two groups.  Willem Dafoe and his friends prefer to get high, shot-gunning marijuana among other things.  (If you’re a parent, please note that I’m just giving you more and more reasons not to let your kids watch Platoon.  Don’t use drugs, kids.  Don’t put shotguns in your mouths, kids.)  Meanwhile, Sergeant Barnes and his friends sit around playing cards. I have to agree with my daughter that they come across as particularly repugnant individuals.

Watching them, she said, “This is why I don’t hang around with guys or people in general.  He just ripped a can apart with his teeth!”  She added, “These people are so unappealing.”  Tellingly she noted, “I’d rather be with the high people than with the cards people.  I don’t eat cans, for one thing.”

She’s onto something that the movie surely wants us to notice.  The people getting high with Willem Dafoe are the sane, moral ones who are rightly horrified by the atrocities they’re being forced to commit.  They’re getting high because the reality of their situation is unbearable for them.  Meanwhile, Tom Berenger and at least some of his friends come across as potential psychopaths who enjoy torturing and killing others.  One of them (Kevin Dillon’s Bunny) continually expresses his delight at being able to torture and kill anybody he wants with impunity.

That’s the problem with what’s happening to these American soldiers in Vietnam.  The soldiers with a conscience are being driven out of their minds by the circumstances.  Meanwhile, the only soldiers remaining in their right minds are the ones who are demented and immoral (and thus untroubled by committing moral atrocities day in, day out). 

The movie is a little heavy-handed about making this point, but I will concede that when talking about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, subtlety and nuance may be almost needless.  The whole thing was pretty much a disaster.  Even if you view our involvement there as necessary, you surely must admit that the collateral damage was high, and the outcome was not what we would have desired.  (And if you admit that, I’ll admit that I’m about the farthest thing from an expert on the Vietnam War.)

I’ve been talking as if the soldiers are split into two groups, but, actually, there’s a third group, too—the African American soldiers, most of whom were drafted and don’t want to be there at all.  Platoon does a good job of highlighting how unfairly the draft targeted black Americans.  I don’t have any expertise on this subject myself, but I did watch Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods last year, and Platoon highlights some of the same issues Lee raises in that film.  In fact, a number of recent films that got Oscar buzz have touched on how poor Americans and minority Americans (often overlapping groups) ended up in Vietnam in disproportionate numbers.  I’m sure it’s not by accident that apart from Sgt. Elias and Chris, most of Platoon’s sympathetic American characters are also African American characters.  We especially liked Forest Whitaker as Big Harold and Keith David as King, and every time Reggie Johnson’s Junior complains about something, the film makes it pretty impossible not to see his point.

Platoon has strengths beyond just its story, too. At several moments during the movie—basically every time the soldiers were walking through the trees—I would temporarily get lost in time, thinking the film was about World War II for a few seconds.  Every time I did that, I would think in confusion, “Why does this keep happening?” Finally I realized, “It’s a visual thing.  Some of these shots really remind me of Inglorious Basterds.”  I didn’t know while watching that Platoon’s director of photography is Robert Richardson, also the cinematographer of Inglorious Basterds (and a number of Quentin Tarantino’s other projects).  Granted, I don’t know if I’m reminded of Inglorious Basterds because of a true similarity in shot composition, or if trees just confuse me. 

The film’s visuals also made me think of the Lord of the Rings movies, and I have no explanation for that.  The way Elijah Wood reacts to those ring wraiths, though, is so similar to Charlie Sheen’s reactions to the enemy ambush.  And there are also marked visual similarities between another character’s death and the death of Boromir.  These things are most likely just coincidental, but that light shining down through the canopy of the trees made me think of the reappearance of Gandalf all the same.  (Perhaps war simply lends itself to certain visual choices.)  At any rate, I enjoyed the cinematography in Platoon.  My daughter and I also liked Georges Delerue’s score.

Best Scene:
Platoon is a disturbing movie mainly because of the sequence that takes place at that village.  Without this scene, the movie wouldn’t be even half as disturbing.  The horrific, graphic, unsettling atrocities carried out by the American soldiers here make Platoon stand apart from war movies of earlier eras.  Even our fairly sympathetic narrator gives into his dark side here for a while.  My daughter glibly made jokes throughout the rest of the film, but this scene made her close her eyes.  When she opened them, they were filled with tears.

Still, for me, this is the defining scene of the film.  It’s the moment when the gritty, realistic, anti-war plot and the human drama, Hollywood movie-like plot come together in the same event.  If Willem Dafoe’s character didn’t do something here, then Charlie Sheen’s character might well become Tom Berenger’s character by the end of this episode.  Under the pressure of the psychological torture created by the situation, Chris is well on his way to becoming a torturer.  But Elias dramatically intervenes and puts a stop to the slippery slope that is making them all fall, one by one, into Hell.

I don’t know if I would have the courage to intervene there.  I hope I would.  For me, the problem would be that I might think I was the one who had lost my mind.  (I tend to be overly vigilant about my own mental health. Right after my son’s birth, I slept downstairs while healing from my c-section and watched myself carefully for signs of postpartum depression. To my horror, I began to hear phantom music in the night.  Hysterically, I fretted, “Why would I be hallucinating?  I’ve never hallucinated before!  I feel fine otherwise!”  But my husband assured me there was no music.  In torment, I stopped taking the pain medication for the c-section.  The music continued.  I was convinced I had lost my mind.  Then by chance, we discovered that our next-door neighbors were going through a painful divorce.  One of them had been retreating to their garage, turning on the radio, and passing out.  Everyone else in my family was asleep upstairs on the other side of the house, and my husband is hard of hearing.  At least we learned the truth before I talked to the OB.  Can you imagine?  “Help doctor!  I have a textbook case of postpartum depression.  When there’s music playing, I can hear it!”)

If I were Willem Dafoe’s character, I would be thinking, “Is Barnes crazy, or am I?”  If I were Charlie Sheen’s character, I would be thinking, “Am I sure about what I saw?  Am I sure it means what I think?  Am I sure I shouldn’t get the medic?”  (In fact, Elias is working with a lot more tangible, irrefutable evidence than Chris.  I do think that if I were Chris, I would get the medic, but maybe that’s because I was always thinking of Gandalf and his wise sayings for no reason while watching the movie.)

The problem is, they’ve been out there wandering around, asked to commit atrocities, with no clear, effective leadership for so long that they’ve all begun to lose their minds.  The situation is so awful.  I said to my daughter, “What they need is someone like Paton giving orders. That way, there are still massive casualties, but at least someone knows what’s going on.”  (On further reflection, though, I suppose they do have a figure rather like Paton in Sgt. Barnes, and he is doing them the opposite of good.)

At any rate, in this village scene, Platoon gives us that captivating Hollywood-style reluctant hero vs. eager villain human drama plus a visceral, almost sickening commentary on what war does to people’s souls (and how the Vietnam War, in particular, utterly destroyed the minds and hearts of the soldiers fighting in it).

It’s the hardest scene to endure, but it’s also the scene that defines the movie.

Best Scene Visually:
My daughter kept noticing visual flourishes.  In one scene, someone takes a drag on a cigarette, then appears to exhale the setting sun.  She loved that.  She also called out the significant differences in the view Chris gets during his multiple helicopter rides.  Willem Dafoe’s last scene is certainly memorable.  (It’s very easy to see why both Dafoe and Berenger were nominated for Best Supporting Actor.)

Best Action Sequence:
As I told my daughter, I never formally studied the Vietnam War in school.  Everything I know about it, I’ve learned by watching movies and TV and occasionally reading relevant non-fiction.  I don’t know specifically what Oliver Stone’s film gets wrong.  But watching Platoon, I did realize that I have probably been getting a lot wrong about entertainment from my childhood my entire life.

During the last big battle scene, when practically every character we know desperately scrambles to endure a relentless enemy attack, something whizzed through the trees that looked almost like a laser. Watching the confusion—which included pyrotechnic sights and ear-splitting sounds—I said to my daughter, “This makes me wonder how different popular fiction of my childhood would have looked to me if I had served in Vietnam.  I feel like there’s a whole subtext to the movies of the 70s and 80s I didn’t consider at the time.”  Granted, a lot of popular 80s movies are explicitly about Vietnam—every Rambo movie, Commando, Good Morning Vietnam.  But as we watched Platoon, my daughter kept saying, “This reminds me of Star Wars.”  I’ll bet Vietnam vets watched Star Wars a little differently than I did (particularly all the Ewok stuff).  Even movies that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with Vietnam—like The Goonies—probably looked different to Vietnam vets.  (As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that it’s not exactly a mind-blowing insight; nevertheless, when I was a child watching popular movies of that era, I was not thinking about Vietnam.  But veterans in the movie theater audience with me probably were, consciously or not.)

The Negatives:
Platoon is disturbing.  I’m a very bad judge of what’s conventionally considered appropriate for children or even what should be disturbing to adults.  When I was a child, my parents let us watch and read pretty much whatever we wanted.  My mother viewed exploring the world through books and film as a relatively safe way to learn more about life.  They let us watch anything they watched.  (To my grandma’s horror, they even let me watch Rosemary’s Baby when I was six—entirely my idea—because I had seen commercials on TV and persistently begged to watch it.  Granted, it was edited for television.)  But they never watched Platoon because my mom had no interest in seeing it. 

My mother’s favorite movie was Pollyanna (an Oscar-winning film that too often gets used as a punchline.  It’s a good movie, and watching will help you understand a lot about my mother’s personality and life philosophies).  But she liked plenty of R-rated movies, too—Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, the Alien franchise.  She wouldn’t have cared for the disturbing realism of Platoon, though.

As a child, I would sometimes get worried when I saw or read something awful because my mother would say, “Once you put something awful into your mind, you can never get it out again.  O be careful little eyes what you see!”  It was so ominous!  I’d watch something and then feel all this torment until as a teen I finally realized that what was upsetting me was not the content but her warning.  (I’m not even sure that children’s song offers a sound interpretation of scripture.  It’s supposed to be what’s coming out of your heart and mind that makes you unclean, not what you encounter!)  At any rate, once I stopped being disturbed that I had ingested disturbing material, I no longer found most things disturbing (in the sense that I wished I hadn’t seen them).  The actions of the soldiers in Platoon are disturbing.  That’s the point of watching the movie.  If someone watches and isn’t disturbed, there’s the cause for concern.  When I feel disturbed by something I’m watching, I immediately become intrigued and think, “Why does this bother me so much?”  I’m just as likely to continue watching a movie I hate as one I love. (Other viewers might feel differently.)

Even I had some misgivings about letting my daughter watch Platoon, though.  My goal is not to traumatize her.  And once the village scene did disturb her, I considered watching the rest of the film without her.  (She was outraged by this plan.  “The end of the project won’t be as satisfying if I don’t see all of the movies!” she argued persuasively.  I had no objection to her wanting to finish watching.  I just didn’t want her to feel like she had to watch something she didn’t want to see to please me.)  

The closer we get to the present, the more R-rated Best Picture winners we will encounter.  I worried about that at first.  Then I remembered that when I was her age, I devoured biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, and Joan of Arc.  (I also read Lolita at age 12 when I was bored in a thrift store.)  I remember a concerned adult asking me, “Doesn’t it scare you to read about Hitler?”  Yes, it should scare anyone!  (One of the scariest parts is that an entire country of ordinary people would somehow become complicit in mass genocide!  If you’re not scared by that, there is a problem.) 

Platoon is intentionally disturbing.  During the village scene, my daughter said, “I would just like to be clear that these guys are completely unsympathetic on every level.”  I told her, “You have to keep in mind that this is an anti-war movie about war.  You’re not supposed to like this.  I would be very worried about you if you did.”

Sometimes movies are supposed to make you upset. (Even Pollyanna can be upsetting!  When my sister and I watched it over Thanksgiving in Mom’s honor, we got so mad.  We were like, “Everybody in this whole town is a jerk except Agnes Moorehead and Aunt Polly!”)

Now I won’t let my daughter watch Midsommar.  In my view, the most disturbing thing about that film is that after its opening sequence, nothing that happens does seem disturbing.  (When I reflected back on the events objectively, I had a thrill of, “What have I become!” type horror.)  That’s more complicated than what’s going on here.  In Platoon, you see the atrocities of Vietnam.  You’re supposed to find them disturbing as you watch.  You do.  (Plus the opening sequence of Midsommar might scare my daughter.  It bothers me.  In fact, I’m quite annoyed by it and perhaps might even be offended if Ari Aster hadn’t also written and directed Hereditary. So while you’re not letting your children watch Platoon, remember not to let them watch Ari Aster films, either!)

But now, leaving children out of it, Platoon is also disturbing for adult viewers.  Even though I’m the last person who should be in combat, just about every male on my dad’s side of the family has been in the military.  Some have chosen it as a career path.  My dad’s older brother was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.  My dad himself enlisted and chose to serve as a JAG clerk guarding the Berlin Wall.  Just about all of my cousins have served in some branch of the military.  One is a recently retired special recon marine, another a former marine who is now in the Air Force.  So while I can’t imagine wanting to serve in combat, I am highly aware that for some people, that is a life calling.  Is Platoon a fair depiction of Vietnam?  Is it a bit too nakedly biased in its desire to convince viewers of the evils of war (especially that war)?  The answer is, I don’t know.  But I can assure you that Platoon is anti-war propaganda. That doesn’t make its message untrue.  I’m just saying that is the message.  “War is evil.  It can turn men into monsters.  This war was especially evil.  We had no clear leadership, and everything devolved into chaos.”  That is definitely what the movie shows us.  Some people may disagree with that message. Some might even be offended by it.

Maybe this movie should be used as a test.  If your child wants to go into the military or law enforcement, let them watch Platoon.  If at the any point, they yell, “Go Sergeant Barnes!  You’re my hero!” then steer them away from leadership positions where they get to carry weapons.

But that’s a joke.  If you are thinking of watching this with your child, please note that the scene in the village is not the only reason for concern.  My own children are somewhat inured to profanity.  (How well I remember when my son was little, and we were happily reading together in the corner of the children’s room of the library.  In response to the events of the story, I asked him, “What would you do if gravity just suddenly went away?”  He replied, “I would say…” and then proceeded to scream every four-letter word that exists at the top of his lungs.  Other mothers started rushing their toddlers out of the room in horror.  I tried to redirect, telling him, “Maybe I would say, ‘Oh goodness gracious!’” And he looked at me like I was crazy and balked, “You would say, ‘Oh goodness gracious???’ if gravity STOPPED EXISTING and EVERYTHING ON EARTH FLOATED AWAY INTO SPACE??”  He was right.  What he was saying was the more appropriate response to that situation.  I thought I was going to die as more and more mothers kept rushing out of the children’s room in horror.  I forgot how to speak, and he just kept yelling out more and more expletives louder and louder and louder.  Finally, I managed to remind him, “We have to be quiet in the library.”  That worked.) 

My point is, Platoon is rated R.  There are all sorts of good reasons your children shouldn’t watch it.  Just forget that my daughter did! (Your kids might know Willem Dafoe as The Green Goblin. My daughter knows him from The Lighthouse.) The entire movie is full of thoroughly objectionable content.  If Chris’s grandma were there, she would faint in the first five minutes! Please do not think because I showed it to my child, you should show it to yours.  It is not a movie for children.  If you choose to watch it with your children, I wash my hands of this matter.  It is not for kids.

Overall:
Platoon is an excellent film about the horrors of war, but I probably won’t watch it again since the experience is so torturous and depressing.  If you think you can handle the disturbing content, the film is worth watching at least once just to see Willem Dafoe’s Oscar nominated performance.  But I won’t be watching it again anytime soon because my Oscar movie buddy did not find most of the characters sympathetic on any level.  She was also disappointed we never got to meet Charlie Sheen’s grandma. But Willem Dafoe is really good.