Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #197 Platoon (1986)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

When I worked at The A.V Club I created a column called Better Late Than Never where writers would experience a cultural touchstone (movies primarily, if I remember correctly) that they somehow never got around to experiencing and then write about the experience. 

I don’t recall there being that many Better Late Than Never pieces because it had an an innate structural flaw. Better Late Than Never articles almost invariably fell into two camps. 

Either the writer experiencing the beloved cultural touchstone agreed that it was wonderful and definitely worth the wait, in which case readers would respond by saying OF COURSE they dug it, that’s why it’s a beloved cultural touchstone, or they’d say that it left them cold, and readers would become apoplectic that some smart-ass pop culture writer was pissing all over a revered classic from a place of unearned revisionist superiority. 

If I had written up Oliver Stone’s career-making 1986 Vietnam movie Platoon for Better Late Than Never my response would have falled neatly into one of those two categories and brother, it sure isn’t the one where I agree with the critical consensus that a zeitgeist-capturing smash lives up to its enduring reputation for greatness. 

From the vantage point of 2021 it’s easy to forget just how huge Platoon was. It was not the first real Oliver Stone movie. That distinction belongs to the infinitely superior Salvador, which was released just nine months earlier. 

But Platoon was the first Oliver Stone movie to make a seismic cultural impact, to be treated not just as a masterpiece and a film of quality and distinction but as a movie that mattered, a movie that was important, a movie that was bona fide news. 

Platoon catapulted its writer-director to the top of the A-list. It also won him an Academy Award for Best Director and a nomination for Best Original screenplay, one of two nominations in that category alone in a singularly auspicious year, the other being for Salvador. 

Platoon proved similarly big for its impossibly beautiful blank of a leading man, Charlie Sheen, who looks distractingly enough like his dad in Apocalypse Now that I continually found myself wishing that I was watching Francis Ford Coppola’s timeless masterpiece instead. 

The seminal anti-war movie won Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger Oscar nominations for their work personifying good and evil respectively and it’s incredible critical and commercial success sure didn’t hurt its uniquely loaded supporting cast either 

Platoon stars Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Keith David, Forest Whitaker, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, Johnny Depp, Richard Edson, Tony Todd and Corey Glover of the band Living Colour. 

That’s right: Dex Dogtective, The Substitute, Green Goblin, Ghost Dog, Johnny Drama, Frank from They Live, Dr. Perry Cox, Jack Sparrow, Candyman and Mr. Cult of Personality all in the same movie! That’s all the stars there are in the heavens and then some!  

Despite bummer subject matter, Platoon was a massive hit, grossing nearly one hundred and forty million dollars in the United States alone, good enough for third place at the 1986 box-office, just behind Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee. 

Despite being an R rated movie for adults Platoon inexplicably inspired a 1987 video game adaptation. The release of Platoon was treated as a watershed moment in pop culture and American history when it officially became okay to talk about the Vietnam War. 

Platoon inspired a wave of Vietnam movies that included Stone’s own Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth. That is one hell of a cultural and creative legacy for a movie that’s vulgar, overwrought and ham-fisted even by Oliver Stone standards. 

We open in 1967 with our green hero Chris Taylor (Sheen) in South Vietnam near the Cambodia border delivering narration in the form of letters to his grandma, an epistolary trope that’s perhaps not supposed to be funny but, like so much of what follows, unintentionally is. 

He begins his narration with “Somebody once wrote, ‘hell is the impossibility of reason”, which provides a good sense of the narration’s insufferable pretentiousness. Even at this early stage in his career Stone was a believer in the notion that if something was worth saying it was worth saying over and over and over again in a variety of different ways. 

The callow pretty boy at the film’s center volunteered for duty, only to discover that it is violent, unpleasant and disproportionately affects the poor, something they apparently did not teach him at the fancy college he dropped out of to become a soldier. 

The suggestible stooge finds himself being pulled in two very different directions by two very different father figures. Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) is Satanic in his evil. He is of the mindset that war is mostly about killing and raping and if you lose one of your brothers in the struggle you should probably piss on his corpse to punish him for being weak and failing. 

Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) subscribes to a much different philosophy, one that insists that you shouldn’t go around raping and killing indiscriminately and if you lose one of your fellow soldiers, you should be sad and not defile their corpse with your urine.

Like countless filmmakers before and after him, Stone uses “White Rabbit” to indicate that his hero is about to leave the straight world behind and enter a Alice in the Wonderland-like realm of color and sensation and insanity beyond his square imagination by puffing on a marijuana cigarette, something he really digs. 

To REALLY drive things home in the most hilariously literal-minded fashion, Stone has Grace Slick command, “FEED YOUR HEAD!” the very moment Chris “feeds” his head with some of that sweet, sweet marijuana smoke. 

Stone also includes a scene in which characters from the 1960s happily sing and dance along to a Motown favorite EVERYONE in the audience knows by heart. This occurs shortly after an African-American character complains of country music, “All them Chucks be rapping about how they losing they ho, saying they ain’t got no bread for beer. Fuck that honky shit. Ought to give me some Motown jams, dig it!!?” 

THAT, friends, is the kind of originality that makes the whole world sit up, take notice, and send an avalanche of awards and accolades your way. That’s how you get the most prestigious honors in all of art. 

The cartoonish horrors of war drive Chris and his platoon more frothing-at-the-mouth insane with each scene until they’re so destroyed psychologically by the killing of one of their own that they’re ready to kill an entire Vietnamese village in violent retribution. 

Chris gets caught up in the violent insanity. With madness in his eyes and hatred in his voice, he glares at a terrified one-legged man and, egged on by the terrible actor who played Johnny Drama, angrily demands, “Dance, motherfucker!…Dance! One legged motherfucker! Dance!” 

The scene where our vengeance-crazed hero forces a terrified, one-legged Vietnamese villager to dance for his demented amusement is supposed to be charged with black comedy and gallows humor.

But it’s not supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny. It shouldn’t feel like a scene that belongs in a Zucker Brothers movie rather than a film with pretensions to great art and important social commentary. It shouldn’t be funnier than the biggest laughs in most comedies. 

Yet that’s exactly how it plays: as demented, belly laugh-inducing unintentional self-parody pitched at a level higher and hotter than frenzied hysteria. It’s one of many moments when Platoon feels uncannily like the intentionally pompous, overwrought film-within-a-film in Tropic Thunder, only sillier and stupider. 

The same is true of a sequence where Sgt. Barnes, having had his fill of Sgt. Elias’ anti-rape, anti-indiscriminate murder philosophy, kills him in cold blood, but the saintly officer somehow manages to live long enough to get shot dozens more times in slow motion by the Vietcong, striking a pose just before perishing that combines Christ on the cross with a referee signaling a touch down. 

The film’s exemplar of Christ-like goodness is being cruelly snuffed out by a world unworthy of him but it takes so ridiculously long for the poor man to die that it becomes unintentionally comic. 

Platoon stops just short of concluding with Sheen reflecting via narration, “Webster’s defines war as… a conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by land, sea, or air.”

Instead, he helpfully sums up the film’s themes for the slow-witted and subtext-impaired. Stone spends the entirety of Platoon cramming the idea that his soldiers are really fighting against themselves, their inner divisions and demons more than the Vietcong and also that Chris is torn between two very different father figures playing tug-of-war with his soul down the audience’s throat.

So Stone ends the movie by having Chris observe sagely, “I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves, and the enemy was in us” and talks about how Barnes and Elias were “fighting” for “possession of my soul” and how he felt “like the child born of those two fathers.”

From the first frame to last, Stone is all about spoon-feeding the audience the most easily digestible and obvious of messages. 

Because Platoon was heralded at the time of its release as a great, important movie, the very best film of 1986, according to the Academy Awards, I expected it to be powerful. It was not. Not in the least. It left me completely cold. 

Thanks to cinematographer Robert Richardson, Platoon looks great and a uniquely over-qualified cast does what it can with the crumbs they’ve been given but even by the standards of films that win best picture at the Academy Awards, Platoon fucking sucks. 

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