Very good


I can't stand war films, simply because I detest war. To get an idea of what people went through in war, I decided to have a look at this, since Oliver Stone likes doing films on real life events.

To say this is brutal, is just typing a word. What they had to go through physically, mentally and in some cases, people were broken, and it is beyond what an outsider can imagine. War is so unnecessary, and yet people volunteer.

I thought Tom Berenger was the stand-out. He was fantastic. I liked Keith David's character. Charlie Sheen did well. Willem Dafoe did well with the time he had on screen.

I remember an interview with comic book creator, Jack Kirby, who was in WW2, and he said you cannot romanticize war. When you come up to an opposing soldier, you have to kill that guy. He also mentioned his captain/sergeant/superior officer, he was talking to him one moment, the next moment he was a dead body.

I don't want to get into the motivations of war, however, I think we who don't go to war, are some of the lucky ones, just because we escape what was portrayed in this film.

An excellent and very sobering watch.

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Terrific movie.
It's an excellent war picture that makes war look horrible for everybody involved, not like some cool Rambo stuff.

An absolutely perfect cast, brilliant and honest dialogue, scary battle scenes but in between the action you can feel the boredom of the grunts just counting the days 'til they can go home.

The first firefight on the ambush patrol where the nice, naive guy Gardner gets killed and Taylor takes a hit to the neck really wakes you up!

I think Platoon is both the best war movie and the best anti-war movie ever.

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My late father-in-law was a Vietnam combat veteran and he said that while the combat sequences in this were well-done, all the stuff about the infighting and conflicts within the platoon were total Leftist Hollywood fiction that catered to the Hippies' "Baby Killer" stereotype of the Vietnam era military. He said the only film he ever saw that truthfully handled the dynamics of the soldiers in Vietnam was "We Were Soldiers". Any platoon that operated like the ones in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, he said, would have been taken off the line immediately and probably dissolved and distributed among functional units.

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Interesting.

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Very interesting. Thanks for your thoughts.

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It is a great film yet very emotionally intense. I see this as basically the Schindler’s List of Vietnam.

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