Platoon (1986)
Directed by Oliver Stone
As a young and naive recruit in Vietnam, Chris Taylor faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man.
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6 films that influenced Platoon
What critics say influenced Platoon
The actual assault has a realism that is convincing even now that we have seen Stone's " Platoon " and Spielberg's " Saving Private Ryan ."
When Kubrick actually takes us out onto the battlefield--a muddy, pocked wasteland rimmed with barbed wire and smoking corpses--it is as powerful a damnation of war as has ever been committed to celluloid, a potent and undeniably modern precursor to the horrors of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998).
From this crop, three stand out as defining films: Francis Ford Coppola's sometimes-brilliant, occasionally disjointed Apocalypse Now, Michael Cimino's blistering The Deer Hunter, and Oliver Stone's punishing, personal Platoon.
Michael Cimino’s Oscar-winner, The Deer Hunter, also featured a hallucinated Vietnam: the war was a bad dream that his heroes, a bunch of regular-guy Pennsylvania factory workers, couldn’t wake up from.
Writer/director Oliver Stone based his movie on his own experiences and attempted to make a more realistic Vietnam movie, simpler and more grounded than things like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter (and more ambitious than the Rambo movies) -- and he succeeds, truly making this war look like hell.
In 1967 and '68, he served in Vietnam for 15 months, being wounded twice, and it's this first- hand grit that distinguishes "Platoon" from "The Deer Hunter" and ''Apocalypse Now."
Stone, who knew Vietnam well, presented the war as a mistake and a nightmare: the stance of many movies since "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now."
Yet it’s precisely because of these struggles that Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest war films—indeed, along with Oliver Stone’s Platoon, probably the greatest war film—ever made.
From this crop, three stand out as defining films: Francis Ford Coppola's sometimes-brilliant, occasionally disjointed Apocalypse Now, Michael Cimino's blistering The Deer Hunter, and Oliver Stone's punishing, personal Platoon.
Platoon had its semi-autobiographical take; The Deer Hunter portrayed the effect the Vietnam War had at home; Apocalypse Now is a journey into darkness.
In 1967 and '68, he served in Vietnam for 15 months, being wounded twice, and it's this first- hand grit that distinguishes "Platoon" from "The Deer Hunter" and ''Apocalypse Now."
Stone, who knew Vietnam well, presented the war as a mistake and a nightmare: the stance of many movies since "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now."
Writer/director Oliver Stone based his movie on his own experiences and attempted to make a more realistic Vietnam movie, simpler and more grounded than things like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter (and more ambitious than the Rambo movies), and he succeeds, truly making this war look like hell.
It’s The Red Badge of Courage, without the courage.
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And Stone breaks our hearts much as Peter Weir did in "Gallipoli," all wasted youth played against a mournful adagio of strings.
Stone begins the picture with the Biblical swatch “Rejoice O young man in thy youth…”and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings (also memorably employed by David Lynch six years earlier, for the climax of The Elephant Man), soon followed by the first of Private Chris Taylor's letters home to his grandma.