Our guide to streaming the winners of the Academy Awards' top prize, including 'Terms of Endearment' and 'Rain Man.'
In “Platoon” writer-director Oliver Stone drops us as he drops his autobiographical 19-year-old, Chris Taylor , into life with the 25th Infantry in Vietnam. It’s a war where there seems to be no master plan, no big picture and no advances. There is only terror, bone-deep exhaustion, nighttime patrols and the humid jungle, crawling with snakes, insects and the silent Viet Cong.
This is movie-making with a zealot’s fervor. Stone, a college dropout, Vietnam infantryman himself with a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart, clearly wants us towhat fighting in that war was like. He 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.
By opening with no preamble, Stone put us into his soldiers’ boots: An aircraft cargo bay yawns wide to discharge “the cherries,” these achingly young soldiers, into the swirling, sulfurous dust of a Vietnam air base in 1967. Rounded up from map-dot towns like Pork Bend, Utah, and Pulaski, Tenn., rushed through training and shipped overseas, these recruits exchange incredulous stares with the war’s old men at the base, 22- and 24-year-olds who look 40 years older.
Then they — and we — are in the jungle, where everything cuts or stings or goes off, where sleep is in two-hour shifts and there’s never enough of it, and where the death of a “cherry” isn’t the same as the death of a long-timer, because he hasn’t yet paid his dues. The platoon’s two rival sergeants — and its twin moral poles — are established: Tom Berenger, his face a road map of scars, as Barnes, and Willem Dafoe as Elias. Both men are superb fighters and consummate leaders but Barnes’ style is to be the stern father, Elias’ the compassionate mother. (
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