I have a feeling this is one of those reviews I am going to get hate mail over, but I do not think that Platoon is a very good movie. Essentially a simplistic piece of propaganda, the film is too contrived and the characters too undeveloped to get into. This is the third film I have seen by Oliver Stone, and it's safe to say I am not going to be joining his fan club.
The film is a sort of unofficial remake of All Quiet on the Western Front in Vietnam instead of World War One. The Lew Ayres part of the unassuming young man caught in the horrors of war is played by Charlie Sheen, as Private Chris Taylor. Unlike the rest of the grunts in the platoon, Taylor is not a poor draftee- he quit college and enlisted because he (correctly) thought the draft system was unfair. He regrets his choice almost immedaitley, as he finds Vietnam to be hell on earth. He is even denied the comaradie in a close-nit group of soldiers because of a "civil war" inside the platoon between the understanding Sergent Elias (Willem Dafoe) and psychotic Sergent Barnes (Tom Berenger). You read that right, Willem Dafoe does not play the psycho. Most of the film is an essentially plotless depiction of their experinces, with a moral conflict at the end.
I think that the crucial problem with the movie is that it is so obvious in its simplistic message. Stone is content to say that war is hell and not go any further. This is also the message of the aforementioned All Queit, but that film had some appealing characters that the audince could identify with, and care about. Milestone's film also built up gradually, whereas this film stars at mach ten and keeps going. The problem is not so much that we don't belevie that events like this could have happend (Stone is a Vietnam vetran), but the movie never places these events in an intellecutal framework while still showing the horrors of the conflict, as Coppola did with Apacalyspe Now and Kubrick did with Full Metal Jacket, both of which I was considerably more moved by.
I realize that I am in the minority on this one, and I a lot of people like this movie (it won the Oscar for the Best Picture of 1986). It may be the film that, for a soldier, most closely represents the Vietnam experince. But I anyway, could never get into it. There are lots of anti-war films out there, and many great ones, and for me, Platoon doesn't belong in their company.
Platoon (1986)