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Like Oliver Stone, who offers a commentary on the film and a dozen deleted scenes, I hadn't seen "Platoon" for a good many years. Watching it again, 20 years after it won an Oscar for Best Picture, I was struck by a number of things.
1) The level of realism. Wow. From the moment that a plane drops "fresh meat" in country and leaves with a fresh cargo of body bags in September 1967, viewers enter a world where sights and sounds tell as much of the story as dialogue or Charlie Sheen's voiceover narration as Chris Taylor, one of the new infantrymen. For the first 10 minutes, Stone uses no dialogue and no narration—just the ambient noises of the jungle and a lot of hand-held camerawork to show us, documentary style, what the jungles of Vietnam looked and felt like through those new pairs of frightened eyes. And the contrast between the veterans of Bravo Company and the new soldiers was just as shocking. If this place didn't kill you, it changed you, and not for the better.
When we first hear Taylor speak, it's like the HBO film "Letters Home from Vietnam," with the young man writing his grandma that "I don't think I can take this for a year. I think I made a big mistake." Taylor stands out from the rest of the recruits, who are the "bottom of the barrel" poor uneducated troublemakers and castoffs of society. Taylor's a bleeding heart liberal who joins partly to honor his grandfather's service but mostly because he doesn't think it's fair that only the poor or non-whites end up doing most of the fighting in Vietnam. But one of the African-Americans tells him, "The poor always bein' fucked over by the rich. Always have, always will." Translation? You dumb rich white kid, your token empty gesture has just earned you a seat in this living hell. For much of the film, Stone is comfortable with long takes and silences, which help him to approximate, as best one can for a two-hour film, "real time." The rough language, the way these soldiers treat each other and the enemy, the firefights and brutalities, the camera angles—all of it contributes to an extraordinary level of realism.
For that, you have to give Stone credit. He forced his actors to take part in a two-week boot camp in the Philippine jungles, during which they stayed in camp and in character the full time, ate canned rations, slept in the jungles (even taking turns on night watch), and were allowed no showers. And the actors who smoked dope on screen apparently did so prior to the scene. Now that's realism.
2) The good cop/bad cop structure. I had forgotten how Sgt. Elias Grodin (Willem Dafoe) was the idealistic good-guy who was sensitive to the Vietnamese peasants and soldiers, while the scar-faced Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) would kill you just as quick as he would order you into a tunnel to blow it. Sgt. Grodin, whose men called him Elias, blew those tunnels himself. One man was the face of humanity trying to stay human throughout an inhuman struggle, while the other was the unadulterated face of war and depravity. One man would pick through a village and kill only when certain a suspect was NVA; the other would torch the whole village and allow his men to do what they wanted. This dichotomous structure is echoed throughout the film, with soldiers separated by race, humanity level, and drug of choice (stoners vs. the Budweiser crowd).
3) Johnny Depp. When the end credits rolled and I saw his name and face, I had to rewatch scenes to see a pre-"21 Jump Street" Depp in action. Sure enough, he's there as Gator Lerner. So is Keith David as King (whom you might remember as the "franks 'n' beans" father from "There's Something About Mary!") and Forest Whitaker as Big Harold (who would get another tour of duty in "Good Morning, Vietnam!"). Young Kevin Dillon is here too, as the psycho, sadistic, and ironically named "Bunny." The cast does a great job of selling the language and zero-courtesy world of "grunts," where the men routinely rag on each other and seem moments away from fistfights. "All you gotta do is make it out of here, and it's gravy. The rest of your life is gravy." Meaning, Vietnam was a death sentence, and if you beat the rap, you got a second life. If you can survive the bugs and disease, the oppressive heat and fungi, the snakes, the enemy, and your own sadistic and mentally unstable men, every day after that is a bonus.
4) The big offensive. I remembered "Platoon" as a slice-of-grunt-life story with background music from Georges Delerue that repeated like a sad "Bolero." The tone of the film felt elegiac to me when I first saw it, and it still strikes me very much that way—and the end tile says that Stone dedicated the film to those who fought and died in Vietnam. But I had forgotten that the "crisis" scene had Taylor's platoon being used as "bait" to flush out an enormous NVA force—a force so big that when the battle came, it felt very much like a Little Big Horn stand. So there's more of a dramatic arc than I recalled.
5) The gold standard. When "Platoon" first showed, it felt like the movie about Vietnam, the way that "The Longest Day" felt like the movie about D-Day when it first came out, and "Tora! Tora! Tora!" felt like the movie about Pearl Harbor. After 20 years, "Platoon" still holds its place alongside "Apocalypse Now" as the gold standard for Vietnam War films. And until someone figures out a way to make a movie out of Tim O'Brien's magical realist novel, Going After Cacciato, which is one helluva book and a film waiting to be made (Tim Burton, are you listening?), "Platoon" will remain the quintessential Vietnam War film. Its weaknesses are few. Some of Taylor's voiceover narration is hokey, and Taylor's schizophrenic personality isn't fully explored so that we understand the reasons behind all of his actions. But that's it. Everything else falls into place.
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[release]18629[/release]