The opening shot of Platoon is of clean-faced Army privates, fresh from boot camp, being revealed by the opening of a massive metal door on the back of an airplane. The wind and dust around them burn orange, suggesting Dante’s Hell more than the overgrown lush green jungle of the Vietnam that had previously been shown in film. The implication is clear: whatever home that these men have come from has ceased to exist. Now, there is only the war, only Vietnam. From there, we are introduced to private Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a bright-eyed idealist who has come to the war to make a difference (he claims that he has avoided college and enlisted to help balance out the discrimination in his society; he is promptly told that that is a white man’s attitude) and a clear proxy for writer/director Oliver Stone. His experiences in Vietnam may be representative, or they may not be, but as a soldier, he is completely anonymous save for his eloquence expressed in his various letters narrated in voice-over.
The primary conflict in Platoon is not between the United States and the Vietnamese (indeed, the war here is so fragmented and chaotic that armies are forced to bomb their own bases in order to make any headway in the larger war), but between Sergeant Elias (Willem Defoe) and Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger). Sergeant Elias may be cinema’s most quintessential Christ figure, evincing compassion and thirst for human dignity even in the most horrible and confused of situations. He is sensitive to the suffering of his men, and seeks to indulge their vices at every opportunity, freely providing them with marijuana in a scene that allows military men to shed their masculinity and display a comaradery typically seen as either juvenile or feminine. Barnes, on the other hand, is the heir to the spiritual legacy of General Sherman, taking the war out of the battlefield and into the thatch-roof huts and rice paddies of the Vietnamese populace. Unlike his soldiers, who utilize the fog of war as an excuse to indulge their most base instincts, Barnes is a model of military discipline, viewing everyone around him (including his own company) as either a weapon or a liability in the war.
The Army is divided, more or less cleanly, into men who follow one of either philosophy, and who have accepted one of the two men as their leader against the higher military authority of their superior officer, depicted as weak, unprincipled, and uncognizant of what it truly takes to win a war. Taylor quickly falls into the Elias side of things, freely associating with the men in his command (it should be noted that Elias’s group is inter-racial, while Barnes’s is not). Time elapses, and thus Taylor is exposed to the same horrors of warfare that film protagonists have been exposed to for eons (rape, the burning of villages, the seemingly endless slaughter for no apparent consequential gain), but throughout, his progress cannot be easily defined as either a devolution or progression, but merely an exposure to the open wounds of civilization that are prone to spilling over and engulfing those who happen to be standing nearby. He certainly learns some things about himself, and his views on the world around him grow more articulate, but it would be hard to argue that he isn’t the same person that he was when he went in. Wizened, maybe, but not a complete political reversal as one might expect from an Oliver Stone film.
And that is Platoon’s great contribution to Vietnam war cinema: an acknowledgement of the murder and insanity that came synonymously with the Vietnam conflict outside of the context that opinion-makers (on both sides of the aisle) put it in for people at home. At the time of its release, many detractors of the film derided it as an assault on the character of the American GI, affirming the beliefs of many that they participated in massacres and attacked villagers without warrant. Incidents such as the My Lai massacre aside, Platoon affirms, as much as anything, that all who participate in war are the victims of violence, even marauders like Sergeant Barnes. The protagonists here are not the ones making decisions, or even believers of the cause, but merely people acting out of an obligation or loyalty to country or some other metaphysical belief that they happen to share with those in uniform beside them. Platoon does not absolve anyone for crimes that they may have committed under the stresses of war, but it makes clear that the vast majority of them were performed while under submission to the same anarchy that all soldiers are asked to submit to, while some are blessed to get away cleaner than others.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Most of the special features are carried over from the two-disc DVD release, including the two audio commentaries from Oliver Stone and Dale Dye, several deleted scenes featuring optional commentary by Stone, numerous featurettes ("Snapshot in Time: 1967-1968", "Creating the 'Nam", "Raw Wounds: The Legacy of Platoon", "One War, Many Stories", "Preparing for 'Nam"), and the theatrical trailers and tv spots. New to this edition are the vignettes "Caputo & the 7th Fleet", "Dye Training Method", and "Gordon Gekko."
"Platoon" is on sale May 24, 2011 and is rated R. War. Written and directed by Oliver Stone. Starring Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker, John C McGinley, Johnny Depp, Keith David, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe.
