Platoon

Nearly a decade after its release, Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), notwithstanding its various esthetic and political shortcomings, remains distinguished as the most authentic cinematic portrayal of the experience of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Departing from most war film genre conventions, and drawing upon Stone's own Vietnam combat experience, the film succeeded in conveying a visceral sense of the chaos, clamor, and fear that characterizes warfare, and provided an almost physical sense of the heat, rain, and muck of the jungle and the maddening plague of mosquitoes, leeches, snakes, and other tropical vermin. It's a powerfully realistic, ground-level, grunt's-eye view of Vietnam - "a white infantry boy's view of the war," as Stone readily acknowledges - and while that laser-beam focus provides the film's emotional intensity, it also accounts for its lack of a broader social and political perspective.

Although Platoon cedes a great deal of respect to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army as fearsome battlefield adversaries, for example, and doesn't stint in its portrayal of how the Vietnamese peasantry was often brutalized by U.S. troops, the film is basically designed as Stone's personal reckoning with his tour of duty in Vietnam and a heartfelt testament to the moral lessons he drew from the experience. Indeed, well before we get to the concluding voice-over sentiments of Stone's alter ego, new recruit Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), that the experience represented a struggle for his soul, that in Vietnam "the enemy was in us," it's clear that the war is principally viewed here as a moral crucible, as an ethnocentric rite of passage.

While this Bildungsroman aspect of Platoon has always been readily apparent - and whose melodrama often threatens to overwhelm the film - one of the things that Pioneer's new Special Edition laserdisc makes clear is how directly autobiographical much of the film is. On a separate soundtrack that can be heard throughout the film's two-hour running time, Oliver Stone offers a running commentary which reveals the firsthand experience behind many specific scenes and offers a variety of intriguing anecdotes and comments on his script (he couldn't resist a few melodramatic lines of dialog, he says, and admits to occassionally getting "a little operatic" with elaborate, stylized cinematic set-pieces, which probably accounts for the film's unexplained 'double death' of Sgt. Elias), the divisive social relations between the troops, a class and racial analysis of the draft, his reasons for using the Samuel Barber "Adagio for Strings" at key points in the film instead of Georges Delerue's score, the various types of war injuries and battlefield medical procedures, idealism in real life and in drama, the moral complexity (some might say moral confusion) of Taylor's murder of Sgt. Barnes, and the adrenaline rush that can make combat incredibly savage but exhilirating ("You go nuts, insane, you're on another planet").

On another supplementary soundtrack, the film's military advisor, retired Marine Captain Dale Dye, offers an equally fascinating account of the lengths to which he and the production crew went to assure the film's accuracy and verisimilitude, down to the smallest details that only a vet would notice. He remarks that he and Stone would occassionally disagree about the representation of certain incidents - such as the attempted rape of a Vietnamese girl - and how they would vociferously argue their views, referring sarcastically to each other as "John Wayne" or "Ho Chi Minh."

The disc also includes a one-hour documentary entitled "A Tour of the Inferno" which describes the remarkable two-week 'boot camp' experience which Stone and Dye put their actors through prior to shooting, and which includes contemporary interviews with Stone, Dye, producer Arnold Kopelson, and many of the film's actors (Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker, and John McGinley), behind- the-scenes production footage, archival footage of the war (which often intercuts seamlessly with scenes from the film), and Stone's reunion with members of his original platoon.

Apart from this wealth of supplementary material, which immeasurably enriches the viewer's appreciation and understanding of the film, Pioneer's Special Edition laserdisc presents a virtual technological 'restoration' of the film. Although Platoon has been available on laserdisc since 1988, this new version presents the film in its original widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with a remixed THX/Dolby Surround soundtrack (which provides a much more effective surround-sound environment), and, most importantly, with a dazzling new scene-by-scene retiming of the color rendition supervised by cinematographer Bob Richardson (which, due to budget constraints, he was unable to do previously). It's no exaggeration to say that Platoon now sounds and looks better (if considerably smaller) than it did on its original theatrical release.

The lavish gatefold jacket simulates a photo album format which blends real-life snapshots of a 21-year-old Stone in Vietnam with production photos and scenes from the film. Also included is Stone's original screenplay, notated with script revisions, handwritten notes on the shooting script, and editing changes, and illustrated with storyboards and diagrams.

Platoon met with considerable controversy, widespread critical acclaim, and surprising box-office success on its theatrical release, and its status as a national event was officially certified by its 1986 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Although the film was vilified by some critics on the right (who denounced it as a left-wing rant against America's role in the war) as well as by some on the left (for whom the film was too narrowly focused and failed to make any effort to explain the underlying reasons for the U.S. presence in Vietnam), the film became a vehicle for a new popular interpretation which simultaneously decried the bogus nature of the war and honored the sacrifice made by tens of thousands of young Americans. For many Vietnam veterans, who had the misfortune to serve in an unpopular war, one widely regarded as America's first military defeat, the film represented a long- delayed measure of national respect. The care and attention that has gone into the production of Pioneer's Special Edition laserdisc clearly befits the historical significance of Oliver Stone's film.