Platoon

National Review, March 13, 1987 by John Simon

Platoon

THE AMAZING thing about Platoon isthat Oliver Stone, the writer-director, who spent 15 months fighting in Vietnam, managed to make a film scarcely different from the soap operas written by hacks who never got closer to the VC than their VCRs. Can you trust a movie that is finally going to tell you The Truth about the Vietnam War if it contains a smiling, ruddyfaced soldier passing around the picture of his girl with whom he will live happily ever after, only to be killed in the next reel? Can you swallow a film whose soundtrack, at a crucial moment of terror, erupts into an amplified heartbeat? Would you buy a used car from a filmmaker whose autobiographical hero, Chris Taylor, begins as a raw volunteer ("Why should just the poor kids go to war and the rich kids get away with it?'), only to emerge as not only a wily, wise veteran, but also the supreme justicer?

Yessir, Chris shoots the demonicSergeant Barnes, whom no one, foe or friend, was able to waste. But Chris, through supernatural sensitivity, deduces that Barnes, in a personal vendetta, perforated his nemesis, the saintly Sergeant Elias. The implications of Platoon are that if we had had a few more Oliver Stones, we might not have lost the war; but because we had at least one, we did not wholly lose our honor: Barnes got fragged by gallant Chris, as he deserved to be, and you should just hear the movie audience applaud.

Platoon is the film of a wild manwho wants to be also a philosopher and a poet. Alas, Stone thinks in cliches and writes in tie-dyed prose, but as a wild man he is authentic enough. Having lasted one year at Yale, he next taught Chinese and Vietnamese students in Saigon; when neither this nor a stint in the merchant marine made a writer of him, he figured the war might to it. After two wounds; a bronze star, and some trouble because of insubordination, Stone returned a bona-fide druggie, but still no writer. Upon failing for Country and for Yale, the choice was either God or something equally hospitable to universal dropouts: film school. At NYU, the young man became a student of Martin Scorsese, not one to leave a Stone unturned.

After a false start or two, Stonewrote the screenplay for Midnight Express, which won an Oscar and more, and established the Stone style: brutal facts--in this case, the hair-raising real-life story of an innocent American potsmuggler in a Turkish jail--that, however true, make the truth seem suspect. Or, if not the truth, the author's motivation for and mode of spelling it out. This became Stone's hallmark, climaxing in Scarface for Brian de Palma, the most gratuitously and mindlessly bloodthirsty film in years. I missed Salvador, which Stone co-scripted and directed, but Platoon, where he is the sole auteur, is clearly his supreme bid for fame thus far.

The film is not without some real,albeit submerged, merits. Shot in the Philippines, with the actors rigorously trained in enduring discomforts and deprivations, it is unsparingly detailed in evoking the full spectrum of horrors, from infestation with red ants and marching on ballooningly blistered feet to undergoing or inflicting the most appalling deaths. About those ants, for example, Chris is informed, while performing the perfect St. Vitus dance, that he is lucky: The red ones are less bad than the black. Which brings me to Stendhal, the first to show hwo utterly befuddled the combatant is in the midst of battle. Stone improves on Stendhal by keeping the audience equally confused: The barkedout commands are swallowed up by the noise of warfare; the hallucinatory images fall prey to darkness or the blinding light of flares.

When you add to this a large castof grunts, most of whom look interchangeable, it is uncertain whether more is gained or lost by the scrupulous rendering of chaos. The effect, on the one hand, is to make horror more horrible by its very inscrutability; on the other, to make it more impersonal and abstract. After seeing the film twice, I still couldn't tell you just what happens to whom (let alone how or why) among the dramatis personae we are only superficially introduced to before we are supposed to care for or condemn them--or, more hopeless yet, feel provocatively ambivalent about.

There are, however, gripping scenesshowing the grunts getting high and anarchic on drugs, and some of the dialogue has the right mixture of anger, wit, obscenity, and desperation about it. Even so, there are few moments that grabbed me by anything other tnan sheer brutality or pandemonium. Here are some. As Chris and the other cherries get off the transport plane that brought them to Nam, they file past their predecessors being shipped home by the same plane in body bags. After a horrifying Mylai-ish incident, when the order is to torch a village, a grunt uses the lighter with which he just incendiated a gook hut to light his cigarette. A shot from a helicopter carrying Chris and other wounded men: While battle still rages around them, the tarpaulin-covered American corpses are laid bare, row on row, by the gust of air from the copter.