BEST PICTURE
WINNER: Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
Stone takes the WWII movie
and puts it in Vietnam. There are
a couple of decent setpieces but overall, I don’t find anything particularly
noteworthy about it apart from this being the only major Vietnam movie that was
directed by an actual Vietnam veteran.
Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger are very good as the dueling Sergeants
with differing philosophies of warfare and leadership, and that dynamic really
is the most gripping part of the film.
This comes to a head in the film’s best scene: a tiny farming village
where the distrustful GI barge in and begin to emotionally and, later,
physically torture several South Vietnamese civilians because they are believed
to be untrustworthy in their association with a battalion of Vietcong. Led by the malicious Sgt. Barnes
(Berenger), even Chris Taylor (Sheen) gets in on the hostilities before Sgt.
Elias (Dafoe) steps in and puts an end to the madness. It is a good scene and Stone certainly
doesn’t shy away from some of the other secret realities of the war (drug use,
racism, classism, disenchantment, distrust of authority), but it also doesn’t
add up to much more than a slightly interesting shrug. Thankfully, this is before Stone got
swept away with his fractured patchwork aesthetic of the 90’s, so the film actually
maintains a consistent point-of-view and shows some understanding of screen
geography, even if it lacks the associative power of his post-JFK work.
