Simply A Masterpiece

One of my all time favorites.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

A young soldier in Vietnam faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man. Oliver Stone's Platoon is truly a triumph both on paper and on screen, the perfomances from the cast were excellent especially Tom Berenger, Williem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen were at top form in this one. The soundtrack was very moving (especially the scene with Elias) there's also alot of young actors such as Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker who have small roles in it. Platoon showcases the horror that War does in men but also the horror we do ourselves and how War changes us and turns us into beasts and shadows of ourselves. This is a War film that you should see. (A+)

I do not watch Vietnam movies because having served in the war, most are far from the reality my expediences of combat. However Oliver Stone did a great job of bringing his own wartime experience to the screen. Charlie Sheen was not the first choice for his part and his performance showed why. He apparently left a lot of his character wisping away in the smoke of a hash pipe and not in the movie. Worse and by that I mean THE worst actor (not character) but actor was Kevin Dillon. Having watched Entourage and enjoying it, except for Dillon, he also caused my 7/10 score for Platoon. It was just Johnny Drama in Vietnam and Entourage was Bunny survives the war (unfortunately) and goes to Hollywood. Dillon in everything I have watched him in, is a stiff, cardboard cutout of someone that should be there but didn't show up. He has only 2 facial expressions, bad attempts to smile and worse attempts to frown, from which he tries to cover the entire range of a characters emotional actions and responses.Willem Defoe, Tom Berenger and Forest Whitaker were the three main actors who along with several others rated this movie a 7 for me. The soundtrack was great, the cinematography was excellent and for that Oliver Stone deserves his awards. I have however watched my last anything with Kevin Dillon anywhere in it. In all, I do so wish Mr. Stone had looked further than Charlie Sheen for an actor, a real actor anyway, and for my money the movie would have been better without the character of Bunny entirely if Dillon was the only choice. YMMV

Many great war films of the Vietnam conflict are centered around these themes of blurred morality and the uselessness of war, and Oliver Stone's Platoon is among the most well known. Stone, who wrote and directed the film and also served as an infantryman in Vietnam, first rose to fame for his war films that dramatized the infamous Cold War conflict. The main premise of his magnum opus are the inner conflicts within US forces deployed to southeast Asia, rather than the actual physical conflicts between them and the Communist-allied Vietnamese forces. More broadly, Platoon analyzes the "duality of man" concept that has been studied in numerous other works, from fellow Vietnam War films like Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Apocalypse Now (1979), all the way back to the latter's source material and inspiration in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Platoon focuses on the moral decay of soldiers in American units, and how this contributes to their inability to fight their Vietnamese enemies. Charlie Sheen sums up this theme with his on-the-nose voiceover, "We did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves... and the enemy was in us."Vietnam War-movies tend to be even harder to watch than most war flicks, as the lines between the "heroes" and "villains" are blurred more than in any other dramatized period of warfare in recent human history. In wars like World War II, which are widely known for being as black and white as military conflicts have become, the contrasting features between the heroic forces we are meant to root for and their opposing enemy platoons are well defined. That is almost never the case with the United States-North Vietnamese/Vietcong conflict in Vietnam during the overarching Cold War.That is not to say that most wars throughout human history have not been many shades of grey, with the winners and losers not always corresponding with the righteous and evil. But because of the guerrilla nature and infamous legacy of the Vietnam War itself - namely, the immense public protest against American involvement - the Vietnam War remains by far the most unpopular war in modern American history. With that said, most of the film is fantastic, from the aforementioned narrative to the grim lightning of the southeast Asian jungles that emphasize the film's tone, to the poignant, melancholic score.

Platoon is a very good film. Willem DeFoe is the hero in it. He is incredible. I am so glad he didn't really get shot. I often believe that what I see in movies is real, and sometimes it is and you ain't foolin' me b's.Charlie Sheen plays Mando, the Argentinian madman rebel hellbent on seeking out and destroying the Vietcong man by man. He is kind of lost, without a purpose unlike Willem, but what purpose is there in war? But Willem had one.Charlie was a ruthless killing machine. At the end he begins to understand that there is good in men when he sees Willem get gunned down. And that sounds horrific, but he appreciated Willem. You want me to remember all these names? This is Nam, b.Tom Berringer plays a madman. But this is juxtaposed by his role in Major League, so I don't give a toss. Or do I? Catch! Good catch Willie Mays Hayes.