Top Vietnam film (Platoon (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Platoon (DVD)
Date:	16/09/09 (5 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Performances

Disadvantages: None

note: also appears in part on The Student Room and Flixster

Platoon is an extremely powerful film about the Vietnam and is frequently regarded as the very best war films ever made. Perhaps what really makes it so powerful is that its writer and director, Oliver Stone, was actually a soldier in Vietnam, meaning that he's able to better avoid romanticism and sensationalism than any other director that has made a film about the subject. This is gritty, visceral filmmaking that's topped with a slew of career-best performances, and of course, stunning writing and direction as usual from Stone himself.

Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is a young man who has abandoned his studies to enlist in the Vietnam war. On arrival, he quickly learns the state of affairs - soldiers are dying at an expontential rate, and of course, soldiers are shellshocked left and right, left with life-changing traumatic mental disorders from the horrors that they have seen.

What really makes this so engaging is the characterisation - Taylor is torn between the more compassionate and level-headed Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), and the extremely crude and harsh, but seemingly invincible Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger). Each promotes their own system of keeping alive, and Taylor will have to decide which he thinks is going to work. The level of verisimilitude that Stone seems to capture, according to historians and critics, is quite harrowing - this is one of the darkest films about the Vietnam war that really makes it as much an internal struggle as it is one against an unseen enemy. This is gritty, visceral filmmaking, and arguably Stone's very best film, and extremely well acted by Berenger and Dafoe in particular.

A fantastically brutal war film about cabin fever in the Vietnam war. The film becomes more and more aggressive, ending in a violent finale that is also iconic (namely DaFoe's arm-raising as the helicopter fires at him from above). Great stuff.

Summary: Harrowing beyond words