he great French filmmaker Francois Truffaut said that “There’s no such thing as an anti-war movie. Every film about war ends up being pro-war”. Oliver Stone’s Platoon illustrates this thesis extremely well. While the film is unflinching in showing moments of war crimes and dehumanization, scenes that cannot be interpreted as anything but anti-war, it still butts against the constraints of Hollywood formula.
War movies occupy a peculiar space in American pop culture. The genre has been incredibly popular since the end of the Second World War, yet the perspective of those films varies wildly. As America’s conflicts became more morally ambiguous during the Cold War, a genre that had often been a form of propaganda for the American military rapidly became darker, less nationalist and more introspective. This can be attributed to the anti-war movement during the 60’s, which was a massive influence on the younger generation of filmmakers that overtook Hollywood in the seventies. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and De Palma’s Casualties of War were bleaker and far more critical of American military conduct and the human cost of waging the war in Vietnam than any Hollywood war films before them. Yet the most overtly anti-war Vietnam movie came after the New Hollywood movement had subsided, in the form of Oliver Stone’s academy award winning Platoon. It was the most explicit condemnation of American war crimes yet produced, a dramatic repudiation of the Vietnam War and its motives.
Yet, while the film is critical of the American perspective, American soldiers are ultimately the viewpoint characters. While the action sequences are tense and exhausting, they are also viscerally satisfying in a way that’s at odds with the film’s tone. While the film pulls no punches in its depictions of the horrors of war, it’s still ultimately very sentimental both in form and content. None of this is to suggest that Platoon is a bad movie. Far from it: it’s very strongly made. But while it disproves Truffaut’s thesis at times, it reaffirms it in other places.
Platoon draws heavily from Oliver Stone’s own experiences in Vietnam, and that gives the film a strong sense of authenticity. While you can be critical of the film’s American perspective, it’s rooted in Stone’s personal experiences with military culture. His illustration of the fraught balance between dehumanization and camaraderie that underpins the military experience is sincere and a rarity in the genre. The film’s protagonist is a private named Chris Taylor, played by Charlie Sheen. Once deployed to Vietnam he is caught in a power struggle within his unit, the 25th Infantry Division, between the level headed and humanistic Sergeant Elias played by Willem Dafoe and the brutal, callous Sergeant Barnes played by Tom Berenger. Their opposing viewpoints represent the struggle within the broader unit to either maintain their humanity in the face of war, or embrace war’s inherent brutality in the pursuit of victory. This conflict comes to a head in one of the film’s most disturbing and powerful scenes, a raid on a suspected Viet Cong hideout that results in the death and rape of dozens of Vietnamese civilians. This sequence is directly reminiscent of the much publicized My Lai massacre, and it remains the most enduringly powerful anti-war scene of the film. The film does a good job of building up to this moment in the minor interactions between members of the company, establishing the atmosphere of dehumanization and paranoia that accompanies being an occupying force. But in the scene of the massacre, the perspective of the Vietnamese is brought into focus. That is when the film delivers its most incisive critiques of America’s conduct during the Vietnam War.
The massacre also opens up a dramatic rift between the two sergeants in Taylor’s unit. Elias, appalled by the wanton massacre of innocents, threatens to court-martial Sergeant Barnes. Elias is then killed under shady circumstances, likely to prevent further investigation of the unit’s war crimes. Another powerful anti-war scene, the murder shows how the dehumanization of the Vietnamese mutates into an inability amongst Barnes and his men to recognize the humanity of their own comrades. After this moment, however, the film makes a sharp pivot towards action. As the soldiers engage with the North Vietnamese army directly, the film’s pace picks up dramatically, and the critique of war recedes. There are spirited attempts to display how unprepared the Americans are for guerilla warfare, culminating in an explosive climax where the Vietnamese ambush the 25h infantry and inflict heavy casualties. But these sequences are filmed with the same frantic, exciting editing and liberal use of dramatic slow motion that had come to define the aesthetic of 80’s action cinema, and would later become common filmmaking techniques in vastly less critical war films like Black Hawk Down and American Sniper. While none of these sequences are bad filmmaking from a technical perspective, in fact they’re masterfully composed considering how early this was in Stone’s filmmaking career , they lend credence to the idea that the inherent charisma of action filmmaking promotes a romantic view of war to the audience despite the film’s dogged attempts to undermine that romantic view elsewhere. Since the American soldiers, as deeply flawed as they are portrayed to be, are given the brunt of characterization as opposed to the Vietnamese, it becomes natural for the audience to identify with them in this climactic battle. As such Platoon, despite its best efforts remains a tale of two films. One is a powerful and humanistic condemnation of the Vietnam War from the perspective of Americans. The other reinforces romantic ideas of war that are rooted in ideals such as bravery and personal sacrifice. These opposing viewpoints do not make Platoon a bad film; far from it. Platoon is dramatically rich, well-acted and contains incredibly powerful moments of introspection and criticism of American involvement in Vietnam. It’s just that these intermittent moments of insight sometimes get lost in the spectacle of Hollywood action filmmaking. I believe that a critical question to ask is whether these moments undermine the film’s anti-war message in favor of thrills for the audience. I do not believe there is a definitive answer, but the question provides a strong reminder to remain skeptical of Hollywood’s depictions of topics as heavy and rooted in bloody and complicated history as war, even ones that might align with your point of view.
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