Although I believe that the best Vietnam war movie is Born On The Fourth Of July by the same director, I find Platoon to be a movie that set the ground for Vietnam war movies. The thing that stays with the viewer mostly after the film ends is the futility of this war. You see a whole movie about war at the Vietnamese jungle and you understand in the end that all this was for nothing. There was no real enemy in this war. Meaning that the Americans invented an enemy and called it Vietnam. It's very interesting to see the two sides of the same coin actually, the one being the character of Tom Berenger, a warlike sadist asshole and the other, the character of Willem Dafoe, an idealist soldier who has stopped believing in this war anymore. The guy who will fight till the end no matter if there is no real, fucking cause and the guy who will take his time and think of what he is really doing there.
Platoon is without a doubt, realistic and bold. You have, at the same time, a bond with these men and you understand the mistake of their actions. Doomed to fight a war that it's not their own, because in reality there is no war there, only the anti-communist hysteria of America that led them there, you feel that these people are martyrs without a noble cause. What I got from the movie, finally, is that there is no war that is been played nicely. War is and will always be a seriously and destructively dirty thing. The first time that I saw Platoon I was really young and although I couldn't get the political effect of the movie, I still got the human aspect of the film. These people were send to be butchered there and there was no real reason for that. A gigantic waste was that war and Platoon shows that not by preaching anything, but by showing the reality of the thing.
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