Platoon: Critic Reviews

Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book 'Dispatches.

The movie is beautifully written (by Stone), constructed with strong, clean lines, immaculately paced and regularly surprising.

Platoon is like the Wall -- a dark and unforgettable memorial to the dead of Vietnam and an awesome requiem to the eternity of war.

I know that Platoon is being acclaimed for its realism, and I expect to be chastened for being a woman finding fault with a war film. But I've probably seen as much combat as most of the men saying, 'This is how war is.'

A film that says...that before you can make any vast, sweeping statements about Vietnam, you have to begin by understanding the bottom line, which is that a lot of people went over there and got killed, dead, and that is what the war meant for them.

Platoon is filled with one fine performance after another, and one can only wish that every person who saw the cartoonish war fantasy that was Rambo would buy a ticket to Platoon and bear witness to something closer to the truth.

...it's still the standard against which all other movies about the Vietnam War are judged.

For all the purported naturalism, the film seems resolutely schematic, and the attitudes shaping the drama are far from open-ended.

The artistic veneer Stone applies, along with the simpy narration provided for Sheen in the way of letters to his grandmother, detract significantly from the work's immediacy.

Platoon is one of those movies that, once seen, will never be forgotten, and, at least for those who were not in Vietnam, will forever alter the way in which the war is considered.

Platoon is different. It matters.

This is movie-making with a zealot's fervor.

The grisly reality is brought to life by Stone's dialogue and emotion-charged combat scenes, raising thought-provoking questions of morality in this still-resonant classic.

Vietnam seems to have made [Stone] a better filmmaker -- his next movies should tell us whether, in the best war-movie tradition, it's also made a man out of him.

Stone, who's known for his excess, offers a few voiceover lines that border on the cheesy, but other than that it's a pretty straightforward realistic tour of duty. And that's what makes it so powerful.

Remains an intriguing blend of the political and the personal, with Stone turning his memories and his opinions about Vietnam into potent drama. [Blu-ray]

No war movie is truly an anti-war movie, but PLATOON comes close, and it's still as powerful as it was decades ago.

The first and best of Stone's Vietnam trilogy, it's also one of his finest pieces of work.

The first and best of Stone's Vietnam trilogy, it's also one of his finest pieces of work.

Most war films adhere to a big-picture purview, explaining which battles meant what and fulfilled which strategic objectives. Stone's effort skirts all that in favor of wrapping the viewer in visceral detail.

A terrific film from a filmmaker long absent from his art, Platoon is a frightening and challenging look into the battlefield operations of Vietnam.

A terrific film from a filmmaker long absent from his art, Platoon is a frightening and challenging look into the battlefield operations of Vietnam.

Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed.

... excellent ... elegiac and poetry-stuffed

Mixing realistic reportage of combat with more conventional morality play (the narrative strategy of all his films), Stone employs the two sergeants (Berenger and Dafoe) as realistic soldiers as well as broader symbols of Good and Evil.