Word: platooner
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...Intrepid will be able to care for as many as 100 patients, including a couple dozen maimed soldiers who entered Monday's dedication ceremony on crutches and wheel chairs. Once the place officially opens next month, they will benefit from a rehab regime that my platoon of wounded warriors could only have dreamed...
...boot camp of hell, and a sensitive man could die from it. "You don't belong in the Nam, man," a warwise soldier tells Chris (Charlie Sheen), who stands in for Stone as the narrator of Platoon. "This ain't your place at all." It is, though, and that is the rite-of-passage tragedy the film describes. For Chris is torn between the conflicting charismata of two sergeants: Elias (Willem Dafoe), a natural jungle fighter, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), a pure-blooded killer. Both men have a nice sense of their power?over themselves, their men and the enemy...
...early stages, Platoon's I-was-there authenticity does nothing but call attention to itself. That big ugly swirl of a scar across Barnes' cheek, for example, inevitably provokes thoughts of an early-morning makeup call. Then two things happen: the actors stop attitudinizing and fall smartly into their roles, and the rivalry between Barnes and Elias begins to suppurate sensationally. Elias, a night-world Natty Bumppo, believes only in his skills and his men; he is both in Viet Nam and above it. Barnes can act as impromptu medic to save a soldier's life or, with equal vigor...
...renegade war correspondent, a self-proclaimed weasel with an itchy social conscience. In El Salvador (and, climactically, back in the States), he learns firsthand of atrocity and duplicity in the name of law. Because the protagonist is knowing instead of naive, Salvador never slips into the haranguing righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller film, this is because it is content to catalog the sins of power; they do not accumulate dramatically until the final twisting crisis. But it is a fine study of a wily man tiptoeing through fatal corruption. Just like Hollywood, Stone might...
...close, Rich, to get the truth," a photographer tells the correspondent in Salvador. "You get too close, you die." Sometimes Stone gets and stays too close. Much of Platoon is strong meat, indifferently prepared. His script is over-wrought?fine, the material virtually demands excess and excrescence?but it is also overwritten, with too much narration that spells out what has already been so eloquently shown. As a director, Stone does not yet have the craft to match or mediate his passion. His film works in spurts: a scene that sputters with bombast will be followed by some wrenching fire...