#86 ‘Platoon’
War, Wounds, and the Masculine Ritual of Self-Destruction Dressed as Cinema Vérité
Platoon (1986) is Oliver Stone’s scorched confessional—a dirt-smeared fever dream about Vietnam that claims to show war as it really was, while still making sure the camera lingers on every slow-motion death like it’s shooting a cologne ad for PTSD. It’s a testosterone baptism by napalm, where young men are stripped of innocence, morality, and shirts—but somehow never of the idea that their trauma is the most important thing in the jungle.
Charlie Sheen plays Chris, a fresh-faced college dropout who enlists in Vietnam because he wants to find something real—because apparently nothing says “reality check” like stepping on a landmine. He narrates the film with an existential weariness that belies his age, which is the first clue this is less a story and more a mythic male psychodrama. Chris isn’t a character. He’s a cipher. An avatar for Stone’s own guilt, disillusionment, and need to stage-manage his memories into moral clarity.
The real story is the war between two father figures: Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), the weed-smoking, soul-bearing Christ figure with cheekbones carved by ethics, and Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), a walking war crime with a scarred face and an even more scarred conscience. Elias = conscience. Barnes = cruelty. Chris = the blank-faced audience caught between them, wondering if he can still go home and get into Brown.
And let’s be honest: the battle between Elias and Barnes isn’t about strategy. It’s about masculinity. Elias feels. Barnes acts. Elias kneels in the jungle like a martyr. Barnes spits blood and ideology. Their conflict is a morality play disguised as a platoon fight, and Chris’s eventual choice between them is treated like spiritual rebirth—except it comes with a machine gun and a dead man’s face burned into his soul.
Meanwhile, the Vietnamese people? Nameless, voiceless, and framed mostly as threat or collateral damage. They’re not part of the story—they’re the terrain the white boys move across, suffer upon, and occasionally massacre in slow, “tragic” dissolves. The film doesn’t dehumanize them overtly—it just forgets to humanize them in the first place. Women? Either sex workers or crying mothers. As usual, the war happens to them. The film isn’t about their losses—it’s about how those losses haunt the men afterward.
Stone’s direction is visceral, yes. Cinematographer Robert Richardson bathes everything in sickly greens and browns. The jungle feels alive. The sound design is claustrophobic. And Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has never been the same since Dafoe collapsed in that crucifixion pose in a clearing. But for all its anti-war intentions, Platoon still indulges in the pageantry of violence. It wants to condemn the horror while showing it with operatic slow-motion and anguished male screams. It critiques the war, sure—but it also aestheticizes it.
3.5 out of 5 dog tags discarded in the mud
(One for Dafoe’s luminous grace under fire. One for the grime and realism. One for the honesty of rage. Half a star for daring to let the protagonist end the film unsure if he’s still human. The missing stars? Left in a burning village with the unnamed women and children the film forgot to mourn—because even in its most self-aware moment, Platoon still believes the most sacred casualty of war is the man who lives to remember it.)
