The best damn Nam movie ever: Platoon (1986)

When you're a young enthusiastic film buff, you try to see the basics, no matter what the genre. Coppola, Kubric, Scorsese, Scorsaza... When IMDb meant something, their Top 250 was a good reference for the classics. In retrospect, it wasn't good at all, because the system was so damn weighted because people abused the system, but even before it went to shit, you come across some legitimate old school cinematic wonders, and some of them are mindblowers.

In the early days of my blind-buying dvd adventures, I went with a star-studded war film by Oliver Stone and Orion Pictures. What I ended up with was some top-10 material, because Platoon is one hell of a movie.

1986 was a time when a lot of great movies were being made. A lot of great actors were getting their starts, and they had to go through Oliver Stone's boot camp to get it. In a way, you have to respect them for that, because it makes the acting a hell of a lot more real. You believe these people, and you have a haunting horrors-of-war story wrapped around their stint in hell.

There are all sorts of sides to the war, but in the end, it's still filled with people, and people have all sorts of conflicting agendas. The characters struggle to cope with fighting not only the VC, but their own side as well.

A lot of war mishaps revolve around orders and higher-ups and this movie shows the divide. These characters can be awful, but they're still the "heroes", and they have nothing to look forward to. Goddamn, it would be an awful thing to fight in a war. I consider myself truly blessed to not have to deal with any of that shit, but it's also important in the sense of learning from those harsh lessons and knowing your place in this world, and how awful things can be if you don't play by the rules.


Charlie Sheen was such a newb in this movie, but he's there to represent the cherry in all of us. I also love how his narration clashes with Martin Sheen's narration in Hot Shots Part Deux, which is also a great (not-quite) war movie.

So many people in this movie... Johnny Depp plays the translator in a small but decent role. Forest Whitaker, Tony Todd, Keith David, John C. McGinley, Kevin Dillon, and a bunch of others are there, but Tom Berenger is so damn intense. Love that makeup, too.

I love the visuals, and how the shots kind of look like lasers sometimes, in that old Orion sort of way. The whole thing is wonderfully crafted, but the performances and characters are all you have to hold onto in a war movie. Everyone in it has moments of good and bad, heroism and horror-show, and there's no black and white for any of these characters, even though the movie has a lot of black people AND white people, and a lot of mexicans and yellows. Even though these characters had to work with each other in the oft involuntary fight on the other side of the world... they don't really have to like each other.

Some of these scenes haunted me. I used to watch this movie all the time because it stuck with me so much, and it can still pack a punch. Namely the village scene and Elias's scene. War crimes galore, and this wasn't even the worst of 'em. Just wait till you see Casualties of War!

Platoon is fucking awesome. My favorite war movie.