It is only natural to find something a little behind-times about a front-line Vietnam movie of 1986, just as one would have done about a tub-thumping World War II movie like Darby's Rangers in 1959. And for all of writer-director Oliver Stone's credentials as a Vietnam veteran himself, the sense of reality is severely disfigured by several things: the promotion of two U.S. sergeants into Good and Evil moral polestars (the Evil one with a spirit-revealing Grand Canyon of scars on his face); the from-the-hip philosophizing of the Innocent protagonist and narrator; the repeated use of Barber's Adagio for Strings to set the desired mood — Albinoni's only slightly more famous Adagio having already been taken for similar purposes in Gallipoli. It is really as a rudimentary combat movie, of a type that abounds about all other wars, even when the point (as here) has to do with the chaos and waste of it all, that Platoon makes its deepest mark. The chaos itself is vividly realized, if even inadvertently enhanced a little by Stone's inexperience as a director; and a couple of preludes to these outbursts are breath-stoppingly tense: no thanks to the amplified heartbeat that Stone seems to have admired in Alan Parker's direction of his — Stone's — script for Midnight Express. With Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, and Willem Dafoe. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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