Platoon Review

Stone served as an infantryman in Vietnam and wrote this to answer the John Wayne version of the war in The Green Berets, and the physical texture is the proof. The cast went through a punishing training course under the veteran Dale Dye before a 54-day shoot in the Philippines, and it shows in how they carry weight, sleep in mud and stop caring. Robert Richardson keeps the camera low in the foliage, and the night ambush and the village sequence, where Barnes kills a woman during an interrogation and the platoon slides toward a massacre, are as frightening as anything in American war cinema.

It weakens in the frame. Charlie Sheen's voiceover reads like a bright student's essay, and the story resolves into two fathers fighting over one soul: Tom Berenger's scarred Barnes against Willem Dafoe's saintly Elias. Both actors are terrific and both were nominated for Oscars, but Pauline Kael's complaint about melodramatic shortcuts sticks, and Wallace Terry, who wrote Time's 1967 cover story on Black soldiers in Vietnam, objected that the film's Black characters are stereotypes. It won Best Picture and Best Director anyway, and mostly earned them.