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Charlie Sheen goes to war in Oliver Stone's Oscar winning Vietnam film Platoon |
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Charlie Sheen (Chris Taylor), Tom Berenger (Sgt
Barnes), Willem Dafoe (Sgt Elias), Kevin Dillon (Bunny), Keith David (King),
Forest Whitaker (Big Harold), Mark Moses (Lt Wolfe), John C. McGinley (Sgt
O’Neill), Francesco Quinn (Rhah), Reggie Johnson (Junior), Johnny Depp (Lerner)
Vietnam has been a long-standing scar on the American
psyche. For over 12 years, American soldiers were rolled into Vietnam to fight
for something many of them were pretty unclear about. Vietnam was a bloody
shadow boxing match for super powers to indirectly combat each other. American
casualties were high, and the country that sees itself as championing justice
and the free world ended the war with the blood of millions of Vietnamese and
Cambodians on its hands. Is it any wonder the country still struggles to
compute this?
Before Platoon there
had been films that had dealt with the Vietnamese experience. Apocalypse Now had embraced the druggy,
morally confused insanity of the war. The
Deer Hunter had effectively shown the traumatic impact the war had on
regular blue-collar steel-workers. But Platoon
was something different. This was the war on the ground, with privates and
sergeants as the focus (many of them poor, working class and also black) – the
lower rungs of American society flung into a war they don’t understand, in a
country they can’t recognise, fighting an enemy they have no comprehension of.
Platoon throws the
audience into the visceral, cruel, terrifying horror of pointless conflict,
with a feeling that the war will never end. Stone pulls off a difficult trick
here: the film shows a horrifying picture of war and killing, but combines this
with successfully showing the adrenalin rush that comes from conflict – and the
excitement of visceral film-making.
Oliver Stone had fought as a young man in a similar unit,
after dropping out of college. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is effectively a
surrogate figure for the director, with the film crafted from Stone’s own
experiences and those of his fellow soldiers. The film is a simple, intense
experience with a straightforward plot: Taylor is torn between two potential “father
figures”. One, Sgt Barnes (Tom Berenger), is a supernaturally ferocious warrior
and martinet whom the men hold in awe. The other, St Elias (Willem Dafoe), is
an equally fierce fighter, but also a hippy, nearly saint-like protective
figure. Which of these two will Taylor side with?
Well okay it’s not a massive surprise really is it? The
strength of Oliver Stone’s film is its visceral, bloody, impressive intensity.
You are thrown into the midst of a series of terrible battles, interspersed
with bored soldiers bickering or taking pot. At no time is the viewer (or the
soldiers) given any real idea about what is going on, what the aims of the war
are, what is really happening in the battles. Stone plays the film totally from
the soldier’s POV. Battles are a confused mess at night. The location of the
enemy is frequently unclear. There are no indications of any tactics at all.
There is barely any leadership – Mark Moses’ Lt Wolfe is an almost hilariously
ineffective moral weakling, who follows the leads of his sergeants. The
soldiers (or rather the two sergeants) essentially operate as lone wolves,
doing what they think best for any particular circumstance.
The film pivots on a confused raid on a Vietnamese village,
as the platoon descends on a village for no very clear reason – apart from
seemingly being pissed off that one of their number has been killed in the
night. Nominally they are searching for Vietcong fighters. But really it seems like
an excuse to let off steam. Platoon
must have hit hard in the 1980s, as it doesn’t flinch at all from watching
American soldiers committing atrocities. Women are shot, teenagers are beaten
to death, a fox hole containing what looks like a child is exploded after a brief
warning. The soldiers are all terrified, thrusting guns into Vietnamese faces.
Above all Sgt Barnes feels no guilt at all at executing villagers in order to
pressure the elders into telling what he thinks they might know about the
Vietcong (who equally are largely faceless figures of terror in the distance
stalking the platoon).
Where the film is less strong is in its plotting and
narrative ideas. These are straightforward in the extreme, with Barnes and
Elias almost literally as opposing devil and angel on Taylor’s shoulders. The
film is clearly weighted in favour of Elias’ hippie mentality, his desire to preserve
innocent lives and his caring attitude to his men. Barnes is presented far more
harshly – even though his brutality stems from his own deep-rooted desire to
keep his men safe, and his belief that Vietnam is hell and you can’t pussyfoot
your way around hell.
Saying that, it’s hard to argue against Stone’s feelings
that compromising your humanity is not worth it no matter the struggles to keep
yourself and others alive. But these are (forgive me) rather obvious, even
traditional points – and its part of the film being essentially a conventional
morality tale with a breath-taking military setting laid over the top. The
ideas in this film won’t really challenge you – and in fact the film itself is
really more of an experience than something that rewards reflection.
Stone’s direction is extremely good – even though he at
times falls too much into the trap of overblown, overly operatic visuals
(Taylor’s final confrontation with Barnes in the forest falls heavily into this
trap). Stone has never been accused of being the most subtle of directors, and
there is no stone (sorry) left unturned here to get the message across. In fact
Platoon frequently hits its points so
hard and with such unsubtle force, that it actually leaves you very little to
think about after its finished – the film does all the work for you, like an
angry rant that goes into unbelievable depth of detail.
But the acting has a very healthy commitment to it. Sheen
shows why he was an actor of promise before he became a self-destructing
punchline. Dafoe is very good as the serene Elias – a man’s man, but one
comfortable in his own skin, with a strange campness about him, whose courage
extends to doing the right thing no matter what. Tom Berenger is hugely
impressive as the cold-edged Barnes, who has had to stamp out his humanity to
survive. The rest of the characters split into two rival camps following these
different soldiers, and there are some fine performances here from some now far
more recognisable actors.
Platoon was
garlanded with Oscars, partly because it talked about the American experience
in Vietnam in a manner (and from a perspective) that had not been addressed
before. It is an important historical landmark of a film, even if it is
possibly not a great film. A simple, at times less than subtle anti-war film
dressed up as a war film, it will immerse you in the conflict and the horror –
but I’m not sure it will give you as much to think about as it thinks it does.
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