When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. —Jean-Paul Sartre

Not being funny but as soon as this Oscar winner's opening credits roll in you are more or less drafted into the narrative. The film begins as boys barely in their 20’s jump out from the back of a plane just in time to see that same space being filled in by dead bodies. Providing a stark outline that this was Vietnam, an almost factory operation; dead bodies out, live bodies in.

As Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) steps into view, the deathly grimace of a soldier almost entirely devoured by the war welcomes him, as a warning. This place will change you, ‘it’s like being in another world.’

The Vietnam War was, in a lot of ways, unapologetically obvious about its class discrimination, drafting the men that were too poor to get a college education or pay a psychiatrist to avoid conflict. It was the war of the underdogs that belonged to a super power, the men that fought in the longest American war were ‘bottom of the barrel and they knew it.’ It is for this reason that Chris and Oliver Stone’s involvement in the war is so pregnant with class guilt and the desire to be redeemed by descending into the working class. The screenplay for Platoon was under edit for around a decade before the film was released. Oliver Stone subtracted and added a myriad of political ideologies and sentiments to get as close to the veteran response to the Vietnam War at the time. One of the reasons this film has been hailed as an ‘authentic’ portrayal of the war, is the fact that Oliver Stone is actually a Vietnam War veteran himself.

In this semi-autobiographical narrative Chris Taylor is Oliver Stone’s alter ego, vulnerable and transparent. Though he is already disillusioned with his abandoned bourgeoisie family values and college education, the war will give his disdain a whole new paradigm shift. Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Elias (Willem Dafoe) are two sergeants of the same platoon and symbolise the worst and best in humanity. They are ‘the two fathers’ that Chris is born of, giving the plot a larger Freudian and literary epic point of view.

During the first half of the film the enemy is faceless, largely silhouetted and the protagonist is only just fighting the jungle as of yet. The rain, the leeches, the snakes and the heat coupled with Chris’s idealism; ‘I just wanna be anonymous, do my share for my country’ is simply setting the stage for the brutality and mindlessness soon to follow. We are shown through the eyes of ‘fresh meat’ what the war was like on the ground. The confusion towards who the enemy really was, ‘a gook could be standing three feet in front of me I wouldn’t know it’ and ‘the impossibility of reason.’ He is blatantly introduced to the managerial system with which the war was operated. Chris is part of the new guys that are being sent out as ‘bait’, since they were deemed dispensable as not too much time had been invested in them. There is a wealth of broad Marxist undertones to be dug out from this narrative and they are by no means accidental. More than once the characters in the movie proclaim how they have to break their backs for ‘the white man’ and that it’s ‘politics man, politics.’

We are shown how men who know little to nothing about the war are subjected to night after night of attacks and ambush. They have minimal training, next to no sleep and their nerves are visibly fraying which translates into the gradual and inevitable erosion of reason. Little by little the soldiers begin to lose their grip on the situation that was never within their reach in the first place. They attack a village in search of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) where Bunny (Kevin Dillion) smashes open the head of a disabled Vietnamese villager as his almost ancient guardian watched, catatonic with incomprehension. This is where the two worlds represented by Elias and Barnes come to a standoff when Elias attacks Barnes. Barnes is threatening to kill the daughter of a villager who he suspects is a NVA agent, Elias being witness to this threatens Barnes with a court martial which sets the wheel in motion to remove Elias as an obstacle to Barnes authority. This is where Chris must choose between his 'two fathers' and the two realms of humanity.

Platoon does not show you the war of and with the Vietnamese. Platoon shows you the war waged internally as a consequence to the war waged externally. This is done because it shows you the point of view of a ‘grunt.’ A ‘grunt’ wouldn’t have subtitles to the Vietnamese being hurled at him, he wouldn’t carry any empathy and understanding towards a culture that he has basically just been thrown into. A grunt would have had almost no contact with women except those on the other side of the enemy lines and would have to choose whether he saw them ‘as a thing’ or ‘a fucking human being’. A grunt would have to deal with his fellow mans insides hanging out, starvation, anxiety, fear and battles with daily morality because a grunt ‘can take it, can take anything.’

But it’s not all bad, Stone interrupts the bleakness with beautifully bright examples of humanity, compassion and humour. For all its shortcomings and irregularities of actual historical accuracy, the movie shows a larger picture of war as business. It’s a desolate plot that is guaranteed to infect you with the same disillusion suffered by its characters.

‘I don’t know brothers, but I’m hurting real bad inside.’

Watch the trailer here.