I’ve been working my way through the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Films of All Time, starting my way from the bottom (Ben-Hur, #100), and working my way up.
Most recently, I’ve watched The Sixth Sense (#89), which holds up remarkably well (even if most of M. Knight Shyamalan’s movies don’t really do much for me), Bringing Up Baby (#88), a ‘30s-era screwball era comedy I had a hard time fully appreciating, and 12 Angry Men (#87), a classic for me that remains such.
And now I’ve just watched Platoon (#86), Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War movie.
The Charlie Sheen part
Charlie Sheen plays Chris, a relatively well off and educated kid who dropped out of college to volunteer to fight in Vietnam. He’s our point of view character, and we get a lot of his voiceover throughout the movie.
The voiceover feels a little… overly written, shall we say? Henry Hill’s voiceover in Goodfellas works perfectly as it helps to draw us into the world of the New York City mafia. However, we could have done with a lot less of Sheen’s Chris laying it on us heavy that war is hell throughout Platoon. “Show don’t tell” comes to mind here – Platoon actually does a lot of this, which often renders the voiceover as overkill, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Then there’s all of the history that we have with Charlie Sheen over the last forty years. It’s frankly a little jarring to see him play things dead straight in a prestige drama. Also see: Wall Street, where I’d say his performance as Bud Fox is the best of his career.
The lack of irony of it all
While Platoon finds room for a little joking around and levity among the “grunts” who are enduring a brutal year of war in Vietnam, Platoon the movie is completely earnest and irony-free.
In that sense, it does feel like the canonical Vietnam movie that all others play off of or against in some way, with movies ranging from Hamburger Hill to Casualties of War to Da 5 Bloods finding their own lane with respect to the war and that era of U.S. culture and history.
For what it’s worth and with respect for Apocalypse Now fans, my vote for the single best Vietnam War movie to date is Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which as it turns out came out about six months after Platoon’s late 1986 release.
The cast
Through no fault of the movie, revisiting Platoon today is slightly distracting because the cast is jam packed with all-star character actors (Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Forest Whitaker, John C. McGinley, and Keith David among them) that would go onto lengthy and fascinating careers.
On top of that, in the case of McGinley, Sheen, and Kevin Dillon (Johnny Drama of Entourage fame!), we’re far more familiar seeing them in comedic roles in recent decades. And then there’s yet another category for TV nerds where you immediately place Mark Moses as Duck Philips from Mad Men and Dale Dye as Colonel Sink from Band of Brothers.
Oh, and lest we forget: there’s also a young Johnny Depp, just a few years into his film career at that point, and Corey Glover of Living Colour fame!
Then it gets really good
And with all of that being said, Platoon works its dark magic and turns out to be an exceptional and gripping war drama that leaves zero room for believing that war is in any way glamorous.
While its storytelling can be heavy handed at times, Platoon gets across how war corrodes everything it touches. Especially in the moral murk of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, there are no winners.