Platoon heads out on patrol in cinemas on December 19, 1986


December 19, 1986. In the mall cineplex, the air was thick with the smell of butter-drenched popcorn and the looming dread of the Reagan era’s shiny, plastic patriotism. Then the lights died, the screen flickered to life, and suddenly we weren't in a cinema anymore. We were in the Green Inferno. We were in the mud. We were in the absolute, gibbering madness of Vietnam. Oliver Stone—a man who actually crawled through the tall grass with a rifle in his hand and the smell of cordite in his lungs—decided to drop a napalm canister right on the doorstep of the American Dream. He gave us Platoon.

This wasn't Top Gun. There were no gleaming white teeth or volleyball montages here. No, man. This was a high-octane descent into the soul of a generation that got chewed up and spat out by the military-industrial complex. It was a war between two fathers: Barnes, the scarred, psychotic god of death, and Elias, the pot-smoking, Christ-like ghost of a conscience that never had a chance.

Charlie Sheen—playing the wide-eyed Chris Taylor—is us. He’s the lamb. He’s the poor bastard who thought he was going to find "honor" in the jungle, only to find that honor is just a word used by old men to get young men to bleed in the dirt.

The theater was silent. Not a polite silence. A heavy, leaden silence. The kind of silence you get right before a car crash. Like the air in a Saigon bar five minutes before the MPs bust in. This isn't the sanitized, John Wayne "Green Beret" horse-pucky we were sold as kids. No, sir. This is a screaming, bloody descent into the heart of a psychedelic meat-grinder.

Stone didn't just make a movie; he took the shiny, Rambo-fied myth of the American soldier and ran it through a woodchipper. He showed the grunts. The "dead-and-don't-know-it" boys. The ones from the bottom of the deck. He showed them getting high in the hooch to dull the pain of the inevitable, and then getting slaughtered because some lieutenant didn't know his map from his elbow.

The cinematography is so raw it leaves you with a contact-rash. It’s all mud, rain, ants, and the constant, thumping heartbeat of Huey helicopters. When that "Adagio for Strings" starts swelling, it doesn't feel like music; it feels like a eulogy for a generation that got sucked into a vacuum of bad policy and worse luck.

Stone isn't asking for your permission to tell this story. He’s grabbing you by the collar and dragging you through the elephant grass until your knees bleed. The "Me-Decade" crowd came in for a little holiday distraction and walked out looking like they’d just been hit with a bag of wet hammers.

It’s a filthy, beautiful, necessary madness. The first casualty of war is innocence? Buy the ticket, take the ride, and watch the innocence get shredded by a claymore mine. Welcome to the jungle, kid. Don't forget to pack your extra socks and your sanity—though after two hours of this, you won't have much use for either.

Good God almighty, what a savage beast they unleashed on December 19, 1986! 

Oscars followed: Best Picture, Director for Stone, Sound, Editing. A clean sweep that screamed truth to power. There was even a Nintendo game, for God's sake, one of the most memorable yet underrated released for the beloved NES. It was too entertaining and adrenalizing to share the message of the film, a morale bar alone unable to stop it from veering into another well done, jingoistic shoot-em-up. Are you ready to crawl through a Vietcong tunnel system, son? Rejoice O young man in thy youth...

Location: Vietnam

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