In September 1967, somewhere in the border region between Vietnam and Cambodia, Private Chris Taylor of the 25th Infantry Regiment arrived. He came to see with his own eyes what true hell looks like. Not the otherworldly, fictional hell dreamed up by writers or artists, but the real, mortal hell where Sergeant Bob Barnes and Sergeant Elias Grodin found themselves face-to-face. They, too, thought they would be fighting Vietcong guerrillas, but it turns out that sometimes you have to fight your own.
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Movies about war are often heavy, especially in our cinema before the collapse of the USSR, but now watching “9th Company” one compares it not with movies like “Platoon” but with action movies like the ones played by Dakaskos. “Platoon” is not a simple action film, or a simple war drama, it is a heavy movie, during which you get a high from the action on the screen and from the dramatic component.
Besides, the actors make “Platoon” stronger than any other war movie, I mean a foreign one. Just mentioning all the actors in “Platoon” is amazing, of course, 21 years ago in 1986 they were not all as stellar as they are now, and many of them had different careers.
Berenger, unfortunately, hasn’t starred in anything good in years, playing high school B-movies. Likewise, Charlie Sheen, who went into the parody genre by working on “Very Scary Movies,” buried his potential in the ground. William Defoe, say, plays in good movies, let’s close our eyes to his villain in “Spider-Man,” Defoe knows how to pick projects for himself, and he’s an incredibly interesting actor.
Also in “Platoon” are Johnny Depp, not very famous 20 years ago, who has become almost the most popular actor of our time, winning two Oscar nominations in recent years and Forrest Whittaker, the main favorite of tomorrow’s Oscar.
At the 1986 Oscars, “Platoon” reigned supreme, with Depp and Whitaker in the background and Berenger, Defoe and Oliver Stone in the lead. Four Oscars with eight nominations says a lot. It is fair to say that the competition was not the toughest, except that Lynch and Woody Allen could prevent Stone, but for the best film of the year, “Platoon” was easier to compete that year than say the other.
Nowadays at the Oscars military films are rare, unless Spielberg will launch something, and the statuette may mark only near-military films, like “The English Patient”. “Platoon” was the last of its kind, as an Oscar-winning action film (though all the action here is in the background), so the last decent Vietnam War film (episodes from “Forrest Gump” don’t count).
In the foreground of “Platoon”, of course, is the soldiers’ relationship, among themselves, with the Vietnamese… Platoon is divided, there is no harmony in it, home is far away, and the war is not needed, neither by the military nor by the locals. America and the Soviet Union needed the war, but there is almost nothing in the film about politics, the film tells the story of the real war from the inside, i.e. how ordinary people stop being people and disappear, while remaining alive outside and dead inside, but this will already be told in the film “Stiletto” about war veterans…
A tough and very frank film, “Platoon” is probably Stone’s best work.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (85.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH.
