Synopsis
As a young and naive recruit in Vietnam, Chris Taylor faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man.
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Cast
- Charlie SheenChris Taylor
- Willem DafoeSergeant Elias Gordon
- Tom BerengerSergeant Robert "Bob" Barnes
- Kevin DillonBunny
- Forest WhitakerBig Harold
- Mark MosesLieutenant Wolfe
- Keith DavidKing
- Richard EdsonSal
- Francesco QuinnRhah
- John C. McGinleySergeant O'Neill
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
It was Francois Truffaut who said that it's not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun. If Truffaut had lived to see Platoon, the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion. Here is a movie that regards combat from ground level, from the infantryman's point of view, and it does not make war look like fun. - 100
The New York Times
Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches." - 100
Washington Post
Platoon is a triumph for Oliver Stone, a film in which a visceral approach to violence, which has always set him apart, is balanced by classical symmetries and a kind of elegiac distance. This is not the Vietnam of op-ed writers, rabble-rousers or esthetic visionaries, not Vietnam-as-metaphor or Vietnam-the-way-it-should-have-been. It is a movie about Vietnam as it was, alive with authenticity, seen through the eyes of a master filmmaker who lost his innocence there. - 100
Los Angeles Times
[Stone] succeeds with an immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon is at ground zero. - 100
ReelViews
If Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter are like slaps to the face, Platoon is a punch to the gut. - 90
Time Out London
Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed. - 90
TV Guide Magazine
PLATOON is a shattering experience. Writer-director Stone, a Vietnam veteran, used his first-hand knowledge to create one of the most realistic war films ever made, one whose success lies in the mass of detail Stone brings to the screen, bombarding the senses with vivid sights and sounds that have the feel of actual experience. - 88
New York Daily News
This mercilessly intense movie is definitely not for the faint of heart. The atmosphere remains highly charged from beginning to end. There’s no letup, nary a suggestion of humor to break the tension. The viewer remains as stunned and repelled by the action as the movie’s well-bred narrator, an idealistic young volunteer (played effectively by Charlie Sheen) who naively expects to find himself by sharing the mud with the mostly poor and uneducated grunts.
