Review of Platoon (1986) by Edith N — 21 Jul 2013

An Object Lesson in How Not to Fight a War.

If you believe IMDb, half of Hollywood was almost cast in this, or else cast but in a different role. My favourite part is that they considered Johnny Depp for the lead but didn't give it to him because he was too young and unknown, surely the last time he was ever declared such. (This was his third movie and the year before he would be launched to Teen Idol status by [i]21 Jump Street[/i].) And while this is one of those movies which saddens me by reminding me that Charlie Sheen can act, it's also interesting to think how it would have looked starring Johnny Depp. Oh, and Charlie Sheen almost fell out of a helicopter during filming and had his life saved by Keith David, so there's that, too; this was about twenty years before Charlie Sheen started breaking down, and he still had some good movies in him. But it seems that shooting Vietnam-themed movies in the Philippines can be dangerous if your last name is Sheen.

Chris Taylor (Sheen) dropped out of college and joined the military, even volunteering to go to Vietnam. He felt, it seems, that it shouldn't be a rich man's war but a poor man's fight, and since his father and grandfather both served their country during the wars when they were young, it is now his turn. When he arrives in-country, he is caught up in the struggle between the vicious Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the saintly Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe, whose fifty-eighth birthday is today). Elias represents the good intentions that sent us into Vietnam; Barnes represents the cruelty we were willing to countenance in order to win. Barnes very nearly instigates a massacre, which Elias heads off. Barnes knows what will happen to him if Elias is allowed to live, but Vietnam can be very dangerous for an American soldier. All Taylor wants to do is survive, but there is still the question of which man he will come to be like when he leaves.

I first saw this film in college, in the one film class I've taken. (History of the Twentieth Century Through Film.) I remember coming up out of the world of the film shaking. I was, it's worth noting, considerably less distracted when I saw it in class. After all, I was sitting in a dark room with nothing but the film; I didn't have a baby then. However, I'm also wondering how much seeing more of Oliver Stone's work has influenced me. Of all the Stone films I've seen, this is far and away the best, and in a way, that's disappointing. He wrote this about his own personal experiences, about what it was like to really be in Vietnam and to walk the balance between light and dark. He worked for years trying to get his film made, because he felt it was a story that needed to be told. And once he'd succeeded, with all his passion and his power, he turned to a hack job about such lunatic conspiracism that even other conspiracy theorists didn't want anything to do with it.

Willem Dafoe was cast because he had mostly played villains. (There's a line at one point about thinking he's Jesus, but he wouldn't play Jesus for another two years.) What he has done since then, I think, is portray a lot of tortured souls--including, of course, Jesus. Even when he plays villains, there is something in them beyond mere evil. I keep thinking of his take on the Green Goblin, probably the most nuanced supervillain in recent cinema. That's a man who is trying to do good, and it drives him insane and turns him to evil. He's been nominated for two Oscars (for this, losing to Michael Caine in [i]Hannah and Her Sisters[/i], and for [i]Shadow of the Vampire[/i], losing to Benicio del Toro in [i]Traffic[/i]), and I think there are several other films where an argument can be made that he should have been. He's not truly a star, not really, but I think this is the film where he became an actor for people who pay attention to acting, which is in some ways better, if not in paycheck.

It is perhaps telling that some of the most tortured of movies about the Vietnam War were made by veterans. Stone--the last veteran to win an Oscar, if you only count people who actually fought in a war--wrote this film to respond to such propaganda pieces as [i]The Green Berets[/i]. Vietnam, I think, was a much more complicated war than World War II, and it's harder to say good things about it. This is not to say bad things about those who fought in it, just about the reasons for causing the fight in the first place. The moral uncertainty behind the origins of the war seems to have rubbed off on what happened in the individual fights, and that's why most of the classic films about Vietnam have been about ambiguity. There may or may not be such thing as a good war, but if there is, Vietnam wasn't it. The real Vietnam was more subtle than the conflict between Barnes and Elias, but we can't all be walking Christ metaphors--and even my professor gave up and acknowledged this one after forbidding their use all quarter.