Pitched between the personal musings of someone who knows and the fire branding invocation of a political liberal, Platoon portrays Oliver Stone's semi-autobiographical experiences in the Vietnam War. Having himself dropped out of an Ivy League education to enlist in the army, he was transformed by the war to such a degree that his theories about its origin and his artwork depicting its experience have largely defined him as a '60s nostalgian lost on a page of time. Regardless of his films set in other time periods Stone's dominant template is the turn from innocence to wisdom, often through the machinations of larger forces beyond the influence of individuals struggling for survival.

Platoon is his first feature film effort to bring the experience of Vietnam-era grunts to the screen and it stands among the most dynamic movies of the '80s. That it helped define the Baby Boom generation with their crucible by fire through Vietnam indicates the signal importance of Stone's attempt to come to terms with his own military experience. That his movie is also among the highest accomplishments of cinema testifies to his contributions as an important filmmaker.

Opening with Ecclesiastes and ending with the numbing refrain of George Delerue's Adagio for Strings, Platoon is the story of Chris (Charlie Sheen), a college dropout volunteer in the army. First seeing Vietnam as a tarmac littered with body bags, Chris is sent into the jungle where he meets with warring factions in his company, skirmishes with enemy positions, patrols endless jungles, goes on leave, participates in a village raid-turned-massacre and is ultimately forced to become a berserk killing machine during a Viet Cong counterattack. Surviving each of these trials he emerges a shattered man able to recognize his frailty and the importance of sharing his story so its experience won't be repeated.

Though the central role of Chris was originally offered to Kyle MacLachlan who backed out due to a conflict with his role in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, it was Charlie Sheen who inhabited Stone's screen surrogate as the prism through which we're drawn into the world of jungle fighting. His 19-year old army private is the palate used for registering the war's joys and horrors just as Chris mirrors the lives around him in a voice-over narrative that gives the film a sense of connection to "the world" in letters Chris writes home to his grandmother.

Included in the film's episodic structure are various generic components long present in movie westerns and other war films. Perhaps most notably Platoon's entire organization around recruits gaining the necessary skill and know how to prove themselves in a final clash with the enemy hearkens to the right-wing John Wayne picture, The Green Berets from 1968. While this connection is partially unavoidable in that Stone's script is hell bent on making the film a microcosm for the entirety of Vietnam experience, it's not too much of a stretch to linger over this basic lack of originality.

Structured as it is according to a frontier myth, Chris and his fellow soldiers forage through the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia looking for intelligence and hostile troops and become symbols of the very same myths the movie is criticizing. Even while skewering the faultiness of masculinity acquired through warlike aggression the convention lets Chris emerge from the war a sympathetic and complex character. His early vulnerability becomes hardened through the burden of killing until he's finally able to disavow the necessity of this experience despite being its resulting product.

Providing a further mythical overlay Chris is envisioned as an innocent sacrificed on the shoals of an unnecessary war. But he is also made out as a shill in the morality play waged by the two warring sergeants of his company, Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Elias (Willem Dafoe). Their opposition to one another further magnifies an historically perceived difference between beer drinking, Southern-descended, might-makes-right career soldiers like Barnes and the pot smoking, urban dwelling, peace-through-necessary-violence draftees like Elias. With Chris and his platoon as tokens of exchange between them, Barnes and Elias are the most compelling characters in the film while also being its most contrived.

Somewhere between father figure sergeants and lost boy platoon privates are the vignettes giving life to the film's Vietnam sequences along with its continued supposition of pop cultural ideas about the war that lack real world referents. To the former group belong the film's village massacre, its midnight patrols and hikes through mosquito infested jungles and the horror of friendly fire. To the latter belong artificial affiliations in the company along the lines of those who get drunk and those who get high, all the time avoiding a deep discussion of the racial distinctions in Vietnam-era soldiering, and the penultimate sequence of a VC raid on American foxholes.

As Chris moves through the film acquiring respect and making friends whenever possible, the plotless story continues developing its themes of innocence lost at the hands of unknown power brokers before concluding in a bath of napalm. As the eponymous platoon defends its position along an unnamed hill, VC soldiers overrun them until nearly everyone is killed and Chris is airlifted from the jungle with a final voice over on the topic of healing from the wounds of experience.

Shot for a budget near $6 million in the jungles of the Philippines, Platoon is famous for using appropriate period details to amplify its plausibility and truth claims but also for showcasing a number of young actors who would later become major movie players. Among their number are Forest Whitaker as Big Harold, John C. McGinley, a Stone regular, as Sergeant O'Neill, Richard Edson as Sal, Kevin Dillon as Bunny, Keith David as Private King, Johnny Depp as Private Lerner and Dale Dye, veteran of seemingly countless military centered movies, as Captain Harris.

In 1985 when the film went into production these actors were, almost to the one, totally anonymous young men with barely more than aspirations. The parallel between their ambitions and the lives of their imagined real-life counterparts should be remembered. It's significant that optimism exists in the turn from childhood to adulthood and Platoon's acknowledgment of this fact in the casting beautiful young men further echoes the historical experience of draft age youth in '60s and '70s America.

With a degree of distance provided by passing times, Stone's movie seems more concerned with the themes of maturation and survival than may have been realized during its initial release. In part this changed emphasis is part of how the film led to a wide recuperation of Vietnam-era veterans into the mainstream after the late '70s and early '80s saw them frequently marginalized in society and in pop cultural artifacts. In part this changed emphasis also points out the way Platoon is a preachy movie that succeeds least when it moralizes in stern contrast to its powerful, intimate moments about men struggling under the harshest of circumstances imaginable.

The luxury to notice this changing valuation might suggest how influential the movie was then and now. Influence aside, and noting that Platoon was a monster hit and critical darling in addition to being a socio-cultural keynote, its win of the Best Picture Academy Award was by no means a given. Put in competition with Children of a Lesser God, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Mission and A Room with a View, prestige pictures all, it's independent funding and subject matter were, if not unprecedented, then at least quite a bit more challenging than that of its cohort. The fertile reception of its story stitched over mythical structures helped determine its popularity along with its depiction of the Vietnam grunt experience that was far more urgent than the narrative problems advanced in any of the other Best Picture nominees.

1986 also saw the release of four American films that have each built long lasting reputations, each of which would have been likable alternative co-nominees to Platoon that deservedly won picture of the year honors. There was David Lynch's focus on suburban surfaces in his first masterpiece, Blue Velvet. Rob Reiner adjusted from being a TV supporting actor into being a big name director with his translation of a Stephen King novella in Stand By Me. James Cameron took on the legacy of Ridley Scott's Alien and issued his own clinic in film style with Aliens. Stone, himself, ever the enthusiastic and political filmmaker also released his James Wood vehicle about a guerilla journalist, Salvador. Each of these four films was an intense, original vision resonating with audiences well enough to continue building a fan base ever since 1986.

In the end, and as a credit to Stone's remarkably productive year as film writer and director with two impressive feature films, Platoon nailed the prevailing zeitgeist. It's tagline stating, "The first casualty of war is innocence", echoed well with the experience of middle-age veterans and the generation of their children who flocked to theaters to be startled, outraged, heartbroken and healed in two hours of cracker jack moviemaking.

Though the cathartic effect of Stone's movie was remarked on during its release its combination of art, commerce and morality was terrifically important 11 years after the fall of Saigon. Were it somehow now possible to force the same urgency and resonance onto other films and filmmakers we would all be better for it.