Word: platooned
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fortunately, as the reception of Platoon shows, there is a market for the truth. Writer-Director Stone was there, for a 15-month tour which won him two wounds, a silver star and the memories he now brings to paying audiences. There have been other powerful films about Vietnam, including The Deer Hunter and the semi-surreal masterpiece Apocalypse Now. But unlike those films, Platoon is at its best when it forgets "art" and acts as eyewitness...
...story is simple: a single infantry platoon operates near the Cambodian border in 1968. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), standing in for Stone, has dropped out of college and volunteered for the Nam, hoping to prove his manhood and his self-worth on the field of honor. The film opens with him joining the platoon clean cut and pale as linen. It ends with him being evacuated, turned black with blood and smoke. The movie is about his transition from one color to another...
There is only the vaguest idea of a military mission to accomplish: from the platoon's point of view, and ours, their only objective is to emerge from the jungle at the end of the day with arms and legs and life intact. Men die in brutal and unexpected ways, booby-trapped, shot from the treeline. The survivors of each attack shake with terror and rage. Their friends die at the hands of an invisible enemy who always seems to be a step ahead...
Protecting and leading the men of the platoon are the squad sergeants, who, under the obligatory incompetent lieutenant, control the lives and fates of the grunts. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is the idealist, trying to preserve some code of moral behavior at the end of the world. Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a creature of the war, a drawling, scarred, amoral survivor. Both are killers. The only difference is how they go about it. As Chris describes it in one of his voice-over "letter home," the two sergeants fight "for the possession of my soul...
...conflict plays itself out in typical movie fashion, with the villain triumphant and then paying the price. But by the end of the film it doesn't seem to matter. The platoon and its politics are the extent of the universe for these grunts, but amidst all the killing and terror and death, justice, poetic or not, has no meaning...