Books, Arts & Manners: Found in the Mud

The amazing thing about Platoon is that Oliver Stone, the writer-director, who spent 15 months fighting in Vietnam, managed to make a film scarcely different from the soap operas written by hacks who never got closer to the VC than their VCRs. Can you trust a movie that is finally going to tell you The Truth about the Vietnam War if it contains a smiling, ruddyfaced soldier passing around the picture of his girl with whom he will live happily ever after, only to be killed in the next reel? Can you swallow a film whose soundtrack, at a crucial moment of terror, erupts into an amplified heartbeat? Would you buy a used car from a filmmaker whose autobiographical hero, Chris Taylor, begins as a raw volunteer (“Why should just the poor kids go to war and the rich kids get away with it?”), only to emerge as not only a wily, wise veteran, but also the supreme justicer?

Yessir, Chris shoots the demonic Sergeant Barnes, whom no one, foe or friend, was able to waste. But Chris, through supernatural sensitivity, deduces that Barnes, in a personal vendetta, perforated his nemesis, the saintly Sergeant Elias. The implications of Platoon are that if we had had a few more Oliver Stones, we might not have lost the war; but because we had at least one, we did not wholly lose our honor: Barnes got fragged by gallant Chris, as he deserved to be, and you should just hear the movie audience applaud.

JS

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John Simon

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The amazing thing about Platoon is that Oliver Stone, the writer-director, who spent 15 months fighting in Vietnam, managed to make a film scarcely different from the soap operas written by hacks who never got closer to the VC than their VCRs. Can you trust a movie that is finally going to tell you The Truth about the Vietnam War if it contains a smiling, ruddyfaced soldier passing around the picture of his girl with whom he will live happily ever after, only to be killed in the next reel? Can you swallow a film whose soundtrack, at a crucial moment of terror, erupts into an amplified heartbeat? Would you buy a used car from a filmmaker whose autobiographical hero, Chris Taylor, begins as a raw volunteer (“Why should just the poor kids go to war and the rich kids get away with it?”), only to emerge as not only a wily, wise veteran, but also the supreme justicer?

Yessir, Chris shoots the demonic Sergeant Barnes, whom no one, foe or friend, was able to waste. But Chris, through supernatural sensitivity, deduces that Barnes, in a personal vendetta, perforated his nemesis, the saintly Sergeant Elias. The implications of Platoon are that if we had had a few more Oliver Stones, we might not have lost the war; but because we had at least one, we did not wholly lose our honor: Barnes got fragged by gallant Chris, as he deserved to be, and you should just hear the movie audience applaud.