Oliver Stone’s Platoon puts a volunteer named Chris Taylor in South Vietnam in 1967 and then refuses to let him look away. The film runs 120 minutes. It is a drama, a war film and an action film at once, and it carries one of the most quoted taglines of the decade: “The first casualty of war is innocence.” That line is not decoration. It is the whole machine.
Platoon was released by Orion Pictures on December 19, 1986. Stone wrote and directed it, and it was the first Hollywood film written and directed by a veteran of the Vietnam War. It is also the first film in Stone’s Vietnam trilogy, followed by Born on the Fourth of July in 1989 and Heaven & Earth in 1993.
Trailer, via Amazon MGM Studios.
Chris Taylor and the 25th Infantry Division
Taylor is a U.S. Army volunteer, played by Charlie Sheen. He arrives in South Vietnam and is assigned to an infantry platoon of the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border. He is young and naive, and the film’s synopsis says it plainly: he faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man.
The platoon is commanded by Lieutenant Wolfe, played by Mark Moses. Wolfe is young and inexperienced. He leans on two non-commissioned officers who are neither young nor inexperienced: Staff Sergeant Barnes, played by Tom Berenger, and Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe.
Barnes is ruthless. Elias is more compassionate. That is the argument the film is built on, and it is not an argument the film settles by having one man win a fight. It settles it by showing what each man’s idea of the war costs the people around him.
A Night Ambush and Its Aftermath
Taylor participates in a night ambush of an invading North Vietnamese Army force and a rebelling Viet Cong force. He is wounded during the firefight. Another new replacement, Gardner, is killed.
That is the first hard lesson. Taylor does not get a scene where he proves himself. He gets a wound and a trip to the aid station, and he comes back to a base where the platoon has already split in two.
Elias and his circle of marijuana users, called “heads,” form one clique. Barnes and his hard-edged followers form the other. Taylor bonds with the heads. It is the first choice he makes in the film that is actually a choice.
Manny, the Booby Trap, and the Village
During another patrol, two soldiers are killed by a booby trap. Manny is captured and slain by unseen assailants. The platoon finds Manny’s body and searches a nearby village, where they find a supply cache.
Barnes aggressively interrogates the village chief and murders his wife in view of the villagers. When he threatens to murder the chief’s granddaughter, Elias intervenes and assaults Barnes. Wolfe breaks up the fight, orders the supplies destroyed and the village razed. Wolfe feigns ignorance when Elias accuses him of not stopping Barnes.
Taylor prevents two girls from being gang-raped by some of Barnes’ men. He is remorsefully unable to prevent Bunny, played by Kevin Dillon, from murdering a villager.
The first casualty of war is innocence.
Back at base, company commander Captain Harris, played by Dale Dye, warns he will pursue an investigation and court martial anyone found to have killed any civilians. Barnes is left worried that Elias will testify against him.
Ambush, Artillery, and the Split Platoon
On their next patrol, the platoon is ambushed and pinned down, taking casualties. Wolfe accidentally directs artillery fire onto his own unit.
That is where the film’s two halves collide. The enemy outside the wire is real. The enemy inside the platoon is just as real, and Wolfe’s mistake makes the difference between them hard to see.
The cast around Sheen, Dafoe and Berenger is deep. Forest Whitaker plays Big Harold. Keith David plays King. Francesco Quinn plays Rhah. John C. McGinley plays Sergeant O’Neill. Richard Edson plays Sal. Reggie Johnson plays Junior. Johnny Depp plays Gator Lerner.
Roles That Got Away
James Woods, who had starred in Stone’s Salvador, was offered the role of Barnes. Despite his friendship with Stone, he turned it down. He later teased that he “couldn’t face going into another jungle with [Oliver Stone].”
Denzel Washington expressed interest in playing Elias, a character Stone said was based on a soldier he knew in Vietnam. Stone confirmed in a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly that Mickey Rourke, Emilio Estevez and Kevin Costner were all considered for Barnes. Stone believes Costner turned down the role “because his brother had been in Vietnam.”
Keanu Reeves turned down the role of Taylor because of the violence. Kyle MacLachlan also turned down Taylor. Sheen said he got the part because of Dafoe’s nod of approval. Jon Cryer auditioned for Bunny, which went to Kevin Dillon.
| Role | Actor who played it | Actor who turned it down or was considered |
|---|---|---|
| Sergeant Barnes | Tom Berenger | James Woods (turned down); Mickey Rourke, Emilio Estevez, Kevin Costner (considered) |
| Sergeant Elias | Willem Dafoe | Denzel Washington (expressed interest) |
| Chris Taylor | Charlie Sheen | Keanu Reeves (turned down); Kyle MacLachlan (turned down) |
| Bunny | Kevin Dillon | Jon Cryer (auditioned) |
Shooting in the Philippines
Stone wrote the screenplay based on his experiences as a U.S. infantryman in South Vietnam. He wrote it to counter the vision of the war portrayed in John Wayne’s The Green Berets. He had already written scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface, and he still struggled to get Platoon developed until Hemdale Film Corporation acquired the project along with Salvador.
Filming took place in the Philippines in February 1986 and lasted 54 days. Many Vietnamese refugees living in the Philippines at the time were recruited to act in different Vietnamese roles.
Stone makes a cameo appearance as the commander of the 3d Battalion, 22d Infantry in the final battle. That battle was based on the historic New Year’s Day Battle of 1968, in which Stone had taken part while on duty in South Vietnam.
Dale Dye, who plays Captain Harris, is a U.S. Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran who also served as the film’s technical advisor. A third U.S. Army veteran appears in the film: a member of the crew, briefly seen shirtless in the climactic battle.
Why Platoon Still Holds
Platoon received critical acclaim on release for Stone’s directing and screenplay, the cinematography, the realism of the battle sequences, and the performances of Sheen and Dafoe.
The film earns that. Its best decision is structural. It never lets Taylor become a hero who understands the war. He arrives naive, he is wounded, he bonds with the heads, he stops one atrocity and fails to stop another, and he ends up in a battle where his own lieutenant calls artillery down on him. The duality of man, as the synopsis puts it, is not a theme the film announces. It is a thing Barnes and Elias embody, and the platoon has to live inside the gap between them.
Berenger’s Barnes is the film’s most frightening piece of casting, because Barnes is not a monster who announces himself. He interrogates a chief, murders the man’s wife in front of the villagers, and threatens the granddaughter. Then he goes back to being a sergeant. Dafoe’s Elias is the counterweight, and the film is careful not to make him a saint either. He assaults Barnes. He is right to. The film still shows the cost.
The supporting cast is where the film’s texture lives. Whitaker, David, Quinn, McGinley, Edson, Johnson, Depp, Moses. A platoon is not three men. Platoon knows this, and it fills the frame with faces that register even when they have four lines.
The 54-day Philippines shoot and the refugee casting matter more than trivia usually does. Stone put Vietnamese refugees into Vietnamese roles. That is not a small thing for a 1986 Hollywood war film, and it is part of why the village sequence lands the way it does.
The tagline is the part that has aged least well, because it is the part that sounds like a poster. The film underneath it is better than the poster. It does not say innocence is the first casualty and then mourn. It shows what the men do after innocence is gone, which is the harder and more honest subject.
Platoon is not a film about whether the war was right. It is a film about what a platoon becomes when two sergeants disagree about what a soldier is allowed to do. That question does not resolve. It just keeps taking casualties.
The published critical score is 9.2/10, with a Metacritic score of 92/100. Platoon earns it. The battle sequences hold up, the village sequence is still the hardest thing Stone ever put on screen, and the Barnes-Elias split is still the cleanest way any American film has staged the argument at the center of the Vietnam War. The casting what-ifs are fun, but they are noise next to what actually got made.
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