Chiasmus cult cinema trailers - "Platoon" (1986). *These will be ongoing posts, courtesy of the A.Glass DVD collection. As I offer via Chiasmus Cult trailers, my summarized overviews*

 

Director Oliver Stone's Vietnam war movie "Platoon" (1986) based off his own experiences as an infantry soldier in Vietnam between 1967 and 1968, completing a script in the months after he returned from Vietnam, and reportable sending it to Jim Morrison of the "Doors", to see if the iconic rock legend could do the soundtrack for a possible movie.   And with all that popular culture mythos attached, Morrison's manager at the time returned the script back to Stone, after Morrison's death in 1971.  The late singer apparently had Stone's Vietnam war experiences script with him before his death, when he was living in Paris.    Eighteen years later in 1986, Stone was able to convince Hemdale Film Corporation, to finance the project, with the stalwart 1970s and 1980s 'risque' movie distribution company Orion on board, filming began in the Philippines in 1986.

Stone was able to cast an ensemble of actors, with a young Charlie Sheen, playing a naive, yet emotionally vulnerable "Chris Taylor", who volunteered to join the infantry to fight in Vietnam, under, the heavily facial scarred, ruthlessly determined Staff sergeant Barnes, played by "Tom Berenger" and Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, in a dichotomy manner, as the honorable soldier who follows the rules of war.  With the platoon divided in two, with the more Right Wing soldiers under Barnes, and the liberal, antiwar, non-committal soldiers under Elias.  Which was Stone's snapshot of a divided society reflected on the battlefield of the Vietnam war, showing up with the allegiances they had towards the two sergeants. 

"Platoon" was one of the last of the Vietnam war movies of the 1980s and 1990s, but one of the most accurate in terms of Stone's own experiences and storytelling, ensuring that the full cast of actors endured rigorous training and understanding of the conflict, so it could be personified onto the big screen.  And the effect still holds up to this day, as one of the most jawboning in portraying the instability of the conflict had on the conscripted young men from impoverished backgrounds, the lack of training, poor leadership from officers, and in turn the cruelty inflicted onto the Vietnamese villages by these American servicemen.

The actions sequences are genuine and intense, with the schism between the divided Platoon widening towards the film's final battle, and as mentioned, representing a divided American society, which still holds up today as an underlying sociological study of American society.   

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(A.Glass 2025)

All CHIAMUS Cult Cinema trailers/commentary to date: chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/search/label/Chiasmus%20cult%20cinema