Skip to main content

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #210: Platoon

The phrase “like father like son” applies really well to Martin and Charlie Sheen. In 1979 Martin Sheen starred in Apocalypse Now, an intense Vietnam War movie that puts its actors through hell. Not to be outdone in 1986 Charlie Sheen was put through an actual boot camp training for Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Sadly nowadays the younger Sheen is better known for starring in sitcoms and behaving wildly offscreen, but Platoon shows there is a great actor buried beneath the tabloid fodder.

Platoon can definitely be described as a guy film in the sense that it features a mostly all-male cast that spends most of its time doing very violent things. A romantic comedy this is not. So obviously I watched it when I was in my late teens with my brother. I am pretty sure we had already seen Apocalypse Now, but even so there are scenes of violence in Platoon that will rattle your cage the first time around. Oliver Stone based the film on his own experiences in Vietnam to give an accurate portrayal of the war. I don’t know about accurate, but if he was aiming for visceral then mission accomplished.

Sheen stars as Chris Taylor, a college dropout who in 1967 volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam. As the movie progresses both Taylor and the audience begin to wonder, what kind of a demented idea was it to volunteer to go to Vietnam? Taylor and the rest of his platoon are not doing their tour in some secure military base surrounded by bullet-proof vehicles. They are in the hot and humid jungle where they can get killed any day by enemy fire, enemy traps, and sometimes even friendly fire. I always found that a weird. Are bullets fired in your direction ever “friendly?”

Stone shows the troops as morally falling apart doing drugs whenever they can and contemplating injuring themselves to be sent home. As for regulations, those begin to loosen up more and more every time the platoon gets attacked. It all comes down to Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe). Elias is well liked by the soldiers and Taylor sees him as a mentor. Barnes on the other hand is a border line war criminal who has no problem with putting a gun to the head of a Vietnamese girl when he suspects her dad may or may not have information about the enemy.

In a more old-fashioned Hollywood movie the bad guy would get what’s coming to him and the good guy would be rewarded for doing the right thing. Not so in Platoon. It shows war as complete and utter chaos, especially during the final battle in the third act when all hell breaks loose. The level of violence is unrelenting, with the enemy pummelling the platoon from every direction. War is hell, and it’s even worse when hell comes at night with grenade launchers.

The movie is also notable for being one of the first movies for many successful future successful actors. In addition to Sheen’s Taylor, the platoon is also made up of John C. McGinley, Tony Todd, Forest Whitaker, Keith David, and even a young Johnny Depp. That’s an impressive roster and sadly most of these actors would go on to make much better movies than Platoon’s star.


Sheen’s questionable career aside, Platoon definitely ranks as one of the top war movies ever made, very close to Apocalypse Now. The fact the two films share similar themes and stars led to a pretty good gag in Hot Shot: Part Deux.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...
Post a Comment
Read more

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...
Post a Comment
Read more

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...
Post a Comment
Read more