Movie Review: Platoon (1986)

★★★★★

Platoon pulls no punches. It's gritty, emotional, and shows the raw, ugly truth of war. Heavy, but so good.

Derek M.

Arkansas

War movies have a way of leaning on heroism. Even when they show brutality, there’s often a sense of glory tucked in somewhere. Platoon isn’t that kind of film.

As a reviewer for BoxReview.com, I can tell you Platoon isn’t designed to make you cheer; it’s designed to make you feel the chaos, the fear, and the moral weight of a war that was as much about survival of the spirit as it was about surviving the battlefield.

The Premise: A Soldier’s War on Two Fronts

The film follows Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a college dropout who volunteers for combat in Vietnam, thinking it’s his patriotic duty. What he finds instead is a brutal reality where the enemy isn’t just the Viet Cong, it’s also the psychological toll of the jungle, the chain of command, and the fractured morality within his own platoon.

The central tension emerges between two sergeants: the compassionate and idealistic Elias (Willem Dafoe) and the ruthless, battle-hardened Barnes (Tom Berenger). For Taylor, the real war becomes a struggle over which leader’s philosophy he will follow.

Oliver Stone’s Personal War Story

Many reviews touch on Platoon being “realistic,” but what makes it so is that Oliver Stone actually served in Vietnam. This isn’t a secondhand war story filtered through Hollywood romanticism; it’s drawn from lived experience.

Stone injects the film with small, telling details: the suffocating weight of the gear, the exhaustion of night watch, the momentary relief of a shared smoke. These quiet scenes are just as essential as the firefights in understanding what life was like for soldiers in the field.

Charlie Sheen as Chris Taylor: An Audience Surrogate

Sheen’s performance is intentionally understated. He’s not playing a swaggering action hero; he’s a stand-in for the audience, learning the ropes, making mistakes, and getting pulled into situations he’s not ready for.

What’s easy to miss is how subtly Sheen changes over the course of the film, from wide-eyed volunteer to weary combat veteran. By the end, his voiceover has the tired, haunted quality of someone who’s seen too much.

Willem Dafoe’s Elias: Idealism in a Lost Cause

Dafoe’s Elias isn’t naive; he knows the war is ugly, but he refuses to let it strip away his humanity. His scenes with Taylor feel like moral anchor points, offering a version of soldiering rooted in compassion and restraint.

The iconic slow-motion scene of Elias’s death, arms outstretched as he’s gunned down, has been analyzed to death. But what’s often missed is how it cements the film’s central tragedy: in this environment, the ones trying to do good often don’t survive.

Tom Berenger’s Barnes: Survival at Any Cost

Berenger’s Barnes is one of the most complex “villains” in war cinema. Scarred both physically and emotionally, he’s the embodiment of war’s brutal Darwinism, only the ruthless make it home.

What’s fascinating is that Barnes isn’t entirely wrong. His methods are horrifying, but in the jungle, they work. That moral ambiguity is where Platoon digs deepest.

The Sound of the Jungle: Atmosphere as Storytelling

Stone uses sound as much as visuals to put you in Vietnam. The constant hum of insects, distant gunfire, and rustling foliage create a sense of unease even when nothing’s “happening.”

And then there’s Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which plays during moments of loss. Its mournful beauty becomes a kind of emotional counterpoint to the film’s violence, a reminder of the humanity slipping away.

The Realism of Exhaustion

One thing that sets Platoon apart is its pacing. Not every scene is action-packed. Sometimes you’re just trudging through mud with the characters, or sitting silently in the rain.

Stone doesn’t cut away from the drudgery because it’s part of the point that war isn’t all firefights; it’s long stretches of discomfort punctuated by moments of pure terror.

The Village Scene: Morality Under Fire

One of the most difficult sequences to watch is when the platoon raids a Vietnamese village suspected of aiding the enemy. Tensions escalate, and lines between right and wrong dissolve in an instant.

This scene doesn’t offer easy answers; it forces you to watch good people do bad things out of fear, anger, or simply following orders. It’s here that Taylor starts to understand the moral decay the war breeds.

Underappreciated Element: The Platoon as a Microcosm

Beyond Elias and Barnes, the platoon is filled with distinct personalities from the laid-back “heads” like King and Francis to the tightly wound Bunny. Their interactions show how soldiers form their own subcultures within the same unit, often clashing just as fiercely with each other as with the enemy.

Why Platoon Still Works Today

Nearly four decades later, Platoon remains one of the most impactful war films ever made because it doesn’t sugarcoat or glamorize. It’s not about victory or defeat, it’s about the cost, paid in lives, sanity, and morality.

It’s also timeless because it’s not solely about Vietnam. The moral dilemmas, the internal divisions, the toll on young soldiers, these are realities in every war.

Final Thoughts

Platoon isn’t a film you “enjoy” in the traditional sense. It’s one you absorb, one that lingers with you afterward. Oliver Stone strips away the myths of war and replaces them with something messier, uglier, and more human.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s essential viewing not just for war movie fans, but for anyone who wants to understand the human cost behind the headlines. And if you’ve seen it before, watching it again might remind you just how rare it is for a Hollywood film to tell the truth this plainly.