Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) was not the first film about
the Vietnam War. It was, however, the first one to be made by a man who had
served as a foot soldier (with the 25th Infantry Division) in the
conflict. Before it was the rah-rah propaganda of The Green Berets (1968). The melancholic drama of The Deer Hunter (1978). The surrealism
of Apocalypse Now (1979). Although,
in good company with many outstanding films about one of the most combative
periods in our country’s history, both stateside and overseas, they lacked the gritty
realism of Platoon. Stone’s film not
only captured the sights and sounds of what it was to be a soldier in those
impenetrable jungles, but also got the little yet crucially important details –
their lingo, the tight brotherhood in each squad and the way they carried
themselves as well as how they carried their equipment. Through every vein of
the film runs an authenticity that only a filmmaker like Stone could give it.
If the aforementioned films
had been released too close to the war, Platoon
came along at just the right moment when enough time had passed so that the
American public was more receptive to revisiting a war that tore this country
apart, from decorated officers coming home to college students who had never
touched a gun in their lives. It struck a chord with people in a way that
previous films had not. Stone’s film was a commercial and critical success,
catapulting him and his young cast of up and coming actors into the spotlight
while also kickstarting a cottage industry of Vietnam War-themed films (Full Metal Jacket; Hamburger Hill), television shows (China Beach; Tour of Duty),
novels (Chickenhawk; Going After Cacciato), and even comic
books (The ‘Nam).
Platoon focuses on the 25th Infantry, Bravo Company in September 1967 with new recruit Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) as the audience surrogate and our introduction to this world. We see the
war through his eyes, from that first blast of bright light as he walks off the
plane with other new recruits and they see a collection of body bags. They are
then taunted by a group of battle-hardened veterans heading home. That will be
them some day... if they live long enough.
Stone cuts to the jungle with
a beautiful establishing shot from a helicopter to show how impenetrable it is
before dropping us in the middle of dense foliage that makes it hard to see
more than a few feet in front of you. Robert Richardson’s cinematography
conveys the dense landscape and how difficult it must’ve been to navigate, especially
for a new recruit like Chris whose inexperience is glaringly obvious as he
brings too much gear, becomes dehydrated and is eaten alive by red ants.
Stone spends the first ten
minutes immersing us in the jungle with the sounds of birds and other exotic
animals and the oppressive heat that you can see on the sweaty, tired faces of
the soldiers. We observe how they interact with each other adopting lingo that
is a mixture of Vietnamese and military jargon before Chris’ voiceover
narration kicks in and he gives us initial observations after a week of being
there.
The film’s rich atmosphere
is evident in the first set piece where the platoon sets up to ambush the enemy
in the middle of night during the pouring rain. Stone ratchets up the tension
as Chris wakes up after falling asleep to see the man who relieved him on watch
now asleep and several silhouetted figures emerging from the shadows. Chris is
frozen by fear and indecision – does he go for his rifle or the explosives that
were set up for the ambush? Stone shows how hard it is to fight in the jungle
with a night-time ambush that goes bad. Everything happens so fast and is so
chaotic that it is hard to follow what is going on until it’s all over.
Thirty minutes in and Stone
establishes a platoon divided into two factions: the “heads,” dope smoking guys
who listen to rock ‘n’ roll music, just want to survive the war and go home,
and the “juicers,” beer-drinking lifers that listen to country music and who
actually like it there or, at the very least, believe that what they are doing
is right. The leaders of these two groups, Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) and Sergeant
Barnes (Tom Berenger), are polar opposites that Chris gravitates towards and
must ultimately choose between. Stone makes it pretty clear which side he
prefers by having Chris initiated by the heads and bonds with them over Motown
music and pot.
Stone shows how the deaths
of three of their own angers and frustrates the platoon and they direct their
wrath on a nearby village with Barnes focusing their rage through him. It is an
ugly sequence as the soldiers kill animals and villagers, in particular, a
harrowing scene where Kevin Dillon’s psycho redneck brutally kills a
handicapped young man. Things go from bad to worse when Barnes interrogates the
village chief and when he doesn’t get the answers he wants kills the man’s wife
and then puts a gun to his young daughter’s head until Elias intervenes.
The village sequence is
important in that it is the catalyst that causes a serious fracture within the
platoon, one that has serious repercussions later on. It also symbolizes
America’s might makes right mentality, underlining how out of control things
got over there as the line between the enemy and innocent villagers became so
blurred that for some there was no difference. This sequence also shows how the
frustration and madness of the situation could get out of hand with horrible
results.
Stone does a good job of
getting the pulse of both sides of the platoon, letting us know where Barnes
and Elias are coming from. For the former, he believes Elias is like the
politicians in Washington, D.C., “trying to fight this war with one hand tied
around their balls,” while the latter admits to Chris that he’s disillusioned
with fighting this war, sagely predicting, “What happened today is just the
beginning. We’re gonna lose this war. We’ve been kicking other people’s asses
for so long I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.” It’s a nice, quiet moment
between Chris and Elias that Willem Dafoe handles wonderfully with a
world-weary subtlety much as Tom Berenger approaches his scene with a less-is-more
attitude. His intense, thoughtful stare says it all and one rightly assumes
that these moments are the calm before the storm.
At that point in his
career, Willem Dafoe was known for playing bad guy roles in films like Streets of Fire (1984) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and so
casting him as a good guy in Platoon
must’ve seemed like a gamble. Dafoe is excellent as a dedicated soldier who
takes the time to teach Chris a few things in order for him to survive. It’s a
very soulful performance as he acts as the platoon’s conscience. Elias cares
about his men and wants to see them all go home alive.
In contrast, Tom Berenger
had been known for playing lightweight, good guy roles but caught Stone’s eye
with his layered performance in The Big
Chill (1983). He gives an absolutely ferocious performance as an intense,
imposing figure, a malevolent force of nature with a penetrating stare and a
twisted scar down one side of his face. Barnes rules his men with an iron fist.
He’s a tough man who leads by example, strict and unwavering in his beliefs. He
is concerned only with maintaining his functioning war machine and when he
spots a spanner in the works, as he does with Elias, he sees it as a
malfunctioning part that must be removed and replaced.
Late in Platoon, Berenger delivers a fantastic
monologue when Barnes confronts the heads, sharing his worldview with them. He
even calls them out, telling them to kill him in almost pleading fashion that
is unpredictable, only adding to the tension of the scene. It’s a speech that
runs the gamut and the actor works the scene, moving around the space, and
interacting with everyone around him in a way that is impressive to watch. Berenger
hadn’t really done anything before this film to suggest such intensity and his
performance was a revelation and is still his best to date.
Stone assembled an
impressive cast of young actors that included Johnny Depp, Keith David, Kevin
Dillon, Forest Whitaker, and John C. McGinley who appear with varying amounts
of screen time. McGinley, for example, makes the most of his moments as the
cocky sycophant O’Neill and Dillon is particularly memorable as a racist
murderer while Depp and Whitaker hardly get any time to make an impact.
The battle scenes have a
visceral, you-are-there feel to them as Stone wisely opts to eschew a
manipulative score for the jarring sounds of battle as orders are barely
understood amidst the sounds of explosions and gunfire. Soldiers are killed
from inexperience and ineptitude as much as for being in the wrong place at the
wrong time. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now presented very stylized
representations of combat in Vietnam while Platoon
is much more realistic, presenting it as noisy and chaotic.
Platoon packs
in a lot of stuff during its running time: botched ambushes, the destruction of
a village, discovery of an underground bunker, and a climactic, large scale
battle that probably wouldn’t have all gone down in such a limited time frame,
but Stone isn’t interested in making a documentary. His film is a dramatization
of a composite of several events that gives the audience some idea of what it
was like there and what these guys went through. Chris’ voiceover narration
gets a bit pretentious at times but that’s the point as he comes from an
educated background of privilege, fancying himself a literary chronicler of his
platoon’s exploits. The images of what he experiences are so powerful that they
render his sometimes cliché musings ineffectual.
After dropping out of Yale
University and a stint with the Merchant Marines, Oliver Stone enlisted the
United States Army, arriving in Vietnam on September 15, 1967 as a member of
the second platoon of Bravo Company, third battalion, 25th Infantry
Division. He was wounded twice and awarded the Bronze Star for combat gallantry
and a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. He was later transferred to the First
Calvary Division and finally returned to the U.S. after more than 15 months in
1968.
By mid-1976, Stone’s
marriage had broken up, he was struggling financially and his screenwriting
career had yet to take off. Ever since he had returned from Vietnam in November
1968, he had wanted to write about his experiences in the war: “I realized I
had forgotten a lot in eight years. I thought, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’m gonna
forget.’ It’s part of our history nobody understands—what it was like over
there.” Stone decided that he would write about his experiences as truthfully
as possible, making only slight adjustments, changing some names and combining
a few characters. “It took me eight years to get to that screenplay, because I
couldn’t deal with it before. I needed the distance.”
Stone finished the script
in a few weeks, finding it challenging in getting the tone right and also the
character of Elias, which he envisioned as a “free spirit, a Jim Morrison in
the bush.” With only one B-horror movie (Seizure)
to his credit, Stone couldn’t find anyone willing to buy his script until
Sidney Lumet showed some interest and toyed with the idea of directing with Al
Pacino starring. After the scripts for Midnight
Express (1978) and Scarface
(1983) were made into wildly successful films, filmmaker Michael Cimino, whom
Stone co-wrote the script for his film Year
of the Dragon (1985), encouraged him to get Platoon going again with him in a producer capacity. In 1984, Stone
cast it and went to the Philippines to scout locations. Dino de Laurentiis, who
agreed to back it, pulled out. He was willing to cover the $6 million budget
but could not find a distributor willing to take a chance on the commercially
risky project.
Stone took the project’s
collapse hard and felt that his career was over. In addition, De Laurentiis
refused to give Stone back his script until he paid for the cost of the
Philippines location scout. This experience, and witnessing how his script for 8 Million Ways to Die (1985) was
completely rewritten, made Stone wary of making Platoon for a Hollywood studio. In 1985, he successful wrestled the
rights for his film away from De Laurentiis and gave the script to producer
Gerald Green. He sent it to John Daly over at Hemdale, a small British
independent production house. Both Daly and Green loved the script and wanted
to make it with Stone as director and Orion Pictures as distributor. Producer
Arnold Kopelson, a lawyer turned movie producer, read the script and felt it
was a game changer. He contacted Green and told him that he would raise the
money for Platoon.
After making Salvador (1986), Stone launched right
into Platoon in February 1986, two
weeks before the former was released in theaters. The filmmaker was locked into
a tight nine-week shooting schedule and used the same crew that worked on his
previous film. In addition, he hired retired Marine Corps captain and Vietnam
War veteran Dale Dye as technical advisor. It would be the beginning of a
long-standing collaboration between the two men over many films.
When it came to casting,
Stone saw Tom Berenger in The Big Chill
and was impressed by his performance: “I felt like there was a redneck side to
Tom, an ugly side that could really be seething, and I used it.” When it came
to Willem Dafoe, Stone saw him in films like Streets of Fire and To Live
and Die in L.A., “playing ugly roles and I thought there was something
spiritually heightened because of the ugliness. So I went the other way.” Dafoe
had met Stone when he first tried to make Platoon
and then he almost got John Savage’s role in Salvador. Charlie Sheen auditioned for the role of Chris in 1983, but
Stone felt he was “gawky and underweight,” according to the actor, and offered
the role to his brother Emilio Estevez with Michael Pare cast as Barnes (both
Mickey Rourke and Kevin Costner were considered for the part). When the film
was restarted, Stone considered Keanu Reeves, Kyle MacLachlan and Johnny Depp
for Chris. Sheen had made a couple of films and auditioned again, this time
Stone cast him in the part.
The cast was scheduled to
arrive in the Philippines in February 1986 shortly after the presidential
election, but when it went sour people died and revolution erupted into civil
war! President Ferdinand Marcos fled on February 25 and Corazon Aquino took
over. Dafoe had flown in early and went to sleep in a Manila hotel only to wake
up to the sounds of tanks in the streets. The rest of the cast flew in nine
days later. Stone contemplated moving the production to Thailand, but it would have
been a logistical nightmare. He held out and made new deals with the new regime,
including renting all the military equipment from the government. Stone said, “I
remember the helicopters were pretty dangerous because they weren’t maintained
well.”
Once the cast assembled in
the Philippines, Dye proceeded to put them through a grueling 14-day boot camp
in order to get them in the foot soldier mindset: “Oliver said, ‘I want you to
take them to the bush, beat them up, make them understand what it was like for
you and me in Vietnam.’” Used to staying in hotels and being pampered, the
actors underwent culture shock as they were constantly in the bush with no
beds, bathrooms, hot showers or any of the creature comforts they were used to.
Dye had them dig their own foxholes to sleep in, set ambushes, learn how to use
various weapons, and go on ten-mile patrols with full gear and weapons. As
Sheen later remarked, “This was a cram course in an infantryman’s life. And it
was rough.”
At dusk on the first night,
Dye asked the special effects people to stage a mortar “attack” without the
exhausted actors knowing what was going on, yelling at them to return fire. Dye
said, “It was utter chaos and they were shaking by the time it was dark.” The
actors learned military lingo, listened to period music and had to refer to
each other by the character’s names. After two weeks of this, they bonded and
were ready to start filming. The cast went from training straight into
principal photography. Dye remembers, “They were just flat exhausted and that
was exactly the look that Oliver wanted.”
The production was not
without its problems as the cast and crew endured fights, injuries, a near-fatal
viper bite, insects, monsoon rains, and the firing of 4-5 production people.
There were also several close calls with the helicopters, including
cinematographer Bob Richardson almost getting clipped by the rotor of one. In
another incident, Dye, Richardson and Stone were in a helicopter that almost
hit a ravine! Stone remembers, “We scraped it by that much. We were so low, and
these Filipino pilots are good, but they’re crazy.” With the start of the rainy
season looming rapidly and running out of money, Stone compromised the last few
shots in order to make the deadline and did it with a day to spare.
Platoon received mostly positive
reviews from critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four
stars and wrote, “There are no false heroics in this movie, and no standard
heroes; the narrator is quickly at the point of physical collapse, bedeviled by
long marches, no sleep, ants, snakes, cuts, bruises and constant, gnawing
fear.” In his review for The New York
Times, Vincent Canby wrote of Stone’s direction: “He doesn’t telegraph
emotions, nor does he stomp on them. The movie is a succession of found
moments. It’s less like a work that’s been written than one that has been
discovered … This one is a major piece of work, as full of passion as it is of
redeeming, scary irony.”
The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson wrote, “This is movie-making with
a zealot’s fervor … [Stone] clearly wants us to understand what fighting in that war was like. He succeeds with an
immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones,
seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon
is at ground zero.” In her review for the Washington
Post, Rita Kempley praised Berenger and Dafoe’s performances: “They are
explosive, mythic Titans in a terrible struggle for the soldier’s souls.”
Finally, Gene Siskel gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “Platoon is filled with one fine
performance after another, and one can only wish that every person who saw the
cartoonish war fantasy that was Rambo would
buy a ticket to Platoon and bear
witness to something closer to the truth.”
Platoon presents the Vietnam War
as a moral quagmire, an impossible situation that the United States had no
chance of winning because they were so out of their depth. All the average
soldier could hope to do was survive. Stone’s film shows what it was like for
them to be there with startling detail and authenticity, from the camaraderie
to the madness. For Stone and a lot of veterans I imagine the experience of
making the film and seeing it was therapeutic. After years of being looked down
on by an uncaring public that saw the war as an embarrassment, Platoon was an opportunity for veterans
to get some much deserved and long overdue respect.
SOURCES
Nashawaty, Chris. “Oliver
Stone Talks Platoon and Charlie Sheen
on the Vietnam film’s 25th Anniversary.” Entertainment Weekly.
May 24, 2011.
Norman, Michael. “Platoon Grapples with Vietnam.” The
New York Times. December 21, 1986.
Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone.
Hyperion. 1995.
Willistein, Paul. “Platoon: The Vietnam Odyssey of Oliver
Stone.” The Morning Call. February 1, 1987.
