Soon, Sheen is in the jungles of Vietnam, beset by ants, leeches, and snakes and hunted by an unseen enemy, the Viet Cong. He is also caught in an alpha male battle between his company's two sergeants, Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Elias (Willem Dafoe). Barnes is a brutal task master, while Elias is comparatively gentle and conscientious. The ranking officer, Lt. Wolfe (Mark Moses), is a wimp who lets Barnes have his way.
The cast includes future moviestars Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker, Kevin Dillon, and Keith David, as well as Stone favorite John C. McGinley. Most of these are cowards or loafers, the exception being Dillon, who plays a psychopath (nearly) as murderous as Barnes.
How others will see it. Platoon garnered a slew of Academy Award nominations, and a generation after its release, is ranked in the imdb Top 250. It was also a winner at the box office.
So it is a popular, successful, and widely respected film. But it is also clearly inferior to Full Metal Jacket and several other Vietnam films. Its popularity, therefore, comes from satisfying audience expectations. Perhaps more than any other movie, Platoon aligns with what the American audience believes happened in Vietnam. Since Stone was a Vietnam veteran, this is perhaps unsurprising.
How I felt about it. Platoon is heavily influenced by its superior predecessor, Apocalypse Now. Let's dispense with the obvious similarity first. Both star a Sheen, with Martin in the Coppola film and Charlie in the Stone version. But there are other parallels as well.
Both films feature young soldiers who are in over the heads, and want more than than anything else to survive and go home. Drug abuse is depicted, as is a massacre scene with (presumably) innocent Vietnamese as the victims.
Of course, there are differences as well. The primarily moral of Apocalypse Now is that war is surreal hell. Platoon is also anti-war, of course (I have yet to see a U.S. movie about the Vietnam War that is pro-war, in contrast to the many pro-war U.S. World War II films). But its theme is traditional: good versus evil, with the protagonist obligated to choose a side. Which he does, in predictable (and, therefore, audience-satisfying) fashion.
Good, at least from a military perspective, is represented by Sgt. Elias. He's hardly a pacifist, but he will not sanction the murder of civilians. This is in stark contrast to Barnes, who would (presumably) like to kill all Vietnamese, since at least some are guilty of being Viet Cong or aiding them. Barnes also would like to kill any U.S. soldiers that he believes opposes his philosophy, especially Elias.
Naturally, the audience is supposed to cheer Elias, who is kind to our protagonist, and hiss the villain Barnes, a killing machine with no sympathy for his own troops. It's evident where Oliver Stone stands on drug use. Elias and his supporters get stoned and wasted, while Barnes remains sober. Perhaps if Barnes listened to Jefferson Airplane's exhortation "feed your head," he wouldn't have been such a jerk.