Oliver Stone
Platoon

Sometimes, those films that are deemed masterpieces of cinema appear to me as "just" good films: A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, Fargo are movies that didn't thrill me enough to make me exclaim them as epoch-making works. This also happened after watching Platoon, considered by many an undisputed masterpiece about the Vietnam War. Thanks to this film, Oliver Stone snagged 4 Oscars: film, director, editing, sound. However, my opinion doesn't change despite the four statuettes and despite the numerous positive comments I've heard around.

Oliver Stone, having come off another "serious" film like Salvador, returns to grapple with war. A war that the director narrates from his point of view, having himself been an American soldier sent to Vietnam for some time. The American's main intent is indeed to show why the USA failed in Asia. Firstly, as the director himself said, Americans thought much more about killing each other rather than confronting the enemies. Stone intends to emphasize this: in the first part, he dwells much more on internal disputes, dirt, and drugs rather than focusing on the guerrilla warfare with the Viet Cong. 

The director, who partially wrote the screenplay, wants to show us the carelessness of the Americans, their verbal and physical violence towards everything and everyone. The sequence in the Vietnamese village is emblematic in this regard, where the director shows us all the arrogance and violence of a platoon that should be helping people in difficulty instead of killing them. Fortunately, someone with a sensible head is still around...

This continuous showcasing of the army's atrocities led him into fierce controversies with the American government, to the extent that the film is entirely funded with British money, given the decline of some American film producers to finance the film.

Defined as a raw, violent, and in some respects "gratuitous" film, Platoon tells the story of Chris played by a very young Charlie Sheen, who volunteers for Vietnam and finds himself facing unforeseen challenges. His sense of disorientation is heightened by the disagreements between the two sergeants of the platoon: Elias (Willem Dafoe), one of the last still with some common sense, and Bob (Tom Berenger), a wild and despotic man.

Thus, while the basic ideas are in some respects "revolutionary" in showing the indifference with which the Americans dealt with the Vietnam War, where is the weak point of Oliver Stone's film? The weak point lies within the film itself: too often the movie lacks events that capture the viewer's attention. A viewer who, among endless dialogues and overly extended night scenes, loses the essence of the film. In particular, the final jungle battle set entirely at night loses beauty and spectacle. And so, in the morning, one will understand what happened during the night...

Platoon is light-years away from Apocalypse Now. Oliver Stone wants to show us the violence that arises from a war fought mostly by young people torn from the USA. It remains a film with a strong polemical sense but precisely because of this, it loses its cinematic effectiveness.