Platoon (1986) Orion Pictures 📢 Director: Oliver Stone 💰 Producer: Arnold Kopelson 👫 Cast: Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen. 🏆 Awards ceremony: -59th Academy Awards: March 30, 1987. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, California. 🎭 Other films nominated for Best Picture this year: -Children Of A Lesser God. -Hannah And Her Sisters. -The Mission. -A Room With A View. 📕 Plot summary: Told through the eyes of rich kid-turned soldier Chris Taylor (CHARLIE SHEEN), the story of a volunteer who lands in Cambodia during the Vietnam war in 1967 and quickly learns the reality of horrors of battle with his outfit. His inexperience initially gets him labeled as a liability with the other men in his unit. WILLEM DAFOE and TOM BERENGER, both on the same team, develop a disliking for one another which ultimately leads to a showdown between them. 💥 Standout scene(s): The inevitable showdown between Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger. Barnes aims his rifle at Elias, but it's one of those 'will he or won't he' moments? 🔑 Facts: -The 59th Academy Awards. -Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, it won 4: Best Picture, Director, Editing, Sound. 🙂 Personal opinion: It's a powerful film and one that is well-made by a controversial director. There is the grim realism of war in a movie made for (and by) a bunch of macho men (a la PREDATOR). Resemblances to Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW (which starred Charlie Sheen's old man), and the second half of Kubrick's FULL METAL JACKET with its depiction of the Vietnam war cannot be overlooked (although Jacket was released a year after Platoon). Tom Berenger's facial make-up and scars are distinctively memorable. I felt that too much of the film was a bit lax in allowing the camaraderie between the guys to play out for too long. The battle sequences in the jungle were repetitive and there was too much bang bang bang bang explosion and a feeling of making it up as they went along. There are some very uncomfortable sequences in the film which I did not like: the soldiers trying to gang-rape a young girl in the village before Charlie Sheen stops it going any further. Things like that disgust me and I really don't want to be 'entertained' by such things thank you. Some of the death scenes, the torturing of a one-legged man and the murder of an elderly woman in front of her daughter. I just can't watch shit like that. To summarise the film into one sentence: intense, loud, uncomfortable, wet, muddy, gruesome, real. The soft music of Barber's 'Adagio For Strings' is an unusual accompaniment for the violent war film that follows. Did it deserve the Oscar? ✅YES, but I say so reluctantly. Best film of 1986 has to be STAND BY ME. 6/10

Review date: 11 April 2025