Oct. 29
Platoon is the first film I've watched about the Vietnam war since after reading and learning about the draft and the attitudes of soldiers during this war. I feel that this movie tried to depict the struggles and emotions of a soldier accurately. The blood and gore submersed me into the world of Chris played by Charlie Sheen and the rest of his platoon. When they raided the village to try and find the VC it seemed like they had no idea what they were doing. There was no real leadership because there were no rules. Soldiers were shooting men and women just because they were scared and confused. They also were raping young women for the fun of it. After this encounter, Chris said "I don't know what's right and what's wrong anymore." I feel that this thought crossed every soldiers mind during the Vietnam War. They were just fighting and sacrificing their lives for no good purpose in their minds. Overall I thought this movie was a great representation of the flaws of the Vietnam War.
Film changes the way people can view many experiences in life. This is especially true on how people view how the military actually is. I can say for myself that all the war movies that I have seen in my lifetime, I always felt like the military was a way to be recognized and gain way to an honorable title. Also, as a kid, my friends and me would always imagine being this type of war hero. Most of the time the movies don’t get the right picture of what the military is. In the movie Platoon we see some truth, but there will always be some fiction element in films. Some truth we can see are some of the horrors of what our troops did over in Vietnam. There is also a lot of dramatics in the movie that don’t relate to real life. The war movies we produce today always have a main character that are seen as a hero. They do all this extraordinary stuff that normal soldiers don’t actually do. This is also true to most television series. Like said in the film chapter of At War, these fictional films are almost like a nonstate propaganda. People expect one thing when they join and get a totally different outcome because they expect this fictional service like in the movies. Then films that are brave enough to actually show these truths of war scare away people and people start to criticize military.
ReplyDeletePlatoon provided an interesting perspective on this question of volunteering versus being drafted during the Vietnam war. For Chris Taylor, his service in Vietnam is one where he volunteered because he wants to do his part like other men his age who were drafted. He says that “I guess having always been sheltered and special, I just want to be anonymous. Like everybody else. Do my share for my country…” However, when he says he dropped out of college to join the infantry to the other men when they ask how he got there, they respond with surprise and start cracking jokes. Chris says that he dropped out of college because he wasn’t learning anything, “and why should just the poor kids go to the war and the college kids get away with it?” to which King responds that “you gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.” I think that this concept of how the rich have a privilege in even being able to publicly assert and question their place and society very interesting. One of the main topics we discussed in class was the protest of college students, a group that was majorly middle- to upper-class and had deferments widely available to them. The poor didn’t have this choice to make, they couldn’t simply decide whether or not they wanted to do their part, they were forced into their situations. Because of the draft and scarcity of deferments, the poor in general had far fewer opportunities to express their discontent with the war or avoid it at all. Therefore, the ability to think about the war in this optional way is a privilege in itself.
ReplyDeleteWar movies have the tendency to gloss over the negative aspects of war while focusing on the positive aspects that often romanticize war. "Platoon" is a war movie that shows both the good and bad of what was happening in Vietnam during the war. "Platoon" shows the positive aspects such as the camaraderie of the men in a unit. At the same time however, "Platoon" shows the negative actions such as "fragging" or harming or even killing another member of the same unit. This is shown when Barnes shoots Elias and leaves him for dead. "Platoon" while a fictional movie is based on real events in the war and there are many parallels between it and the documentary "Winter Soldier". Random killings, rape, and burning down villages are all things talked about in "Winter Soldier" that were showed in "Platoon". The purpose of a movie such as this was to draw attention to the issues associated with war and one of the lines the movie ends with speaks to that idea. At the end of the movie Chris is talking to himself saying, "Those of us that did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know." This line is symbolic of the movies intent, which is to show the true nature of war, both positive and negative.
ReplyDeleteTo go off the quote said by Charlie Sheen, “I don’t know what's right and what is wrong anymore.” At first, I assumed that all these soldiers were trained to kill or torture any Vietnamese captured while at war. Throughout the movie I began to shift the angle at which I thought about this, that they may have been taught that but did they really want to? The scene when the Sergeant shoots the vietnamese mans wife in the head really stood out to me. You always hear about that stuff but seeing it in a movie made me really stop and say “Woah.” to myself. I believe most of these men were lost almost in a sense after being mentally stunned by their own actions and armies actions. I know I would be, but one question I’ve always had regarding war movies is how accurate are they? You can only believe so much because the obvious factor is that it is a movie but you figure, all this has to come from somewhere. I believe some of it is accurate while some of it is a little off. This was the first time I’ve ever watched this film and I think it is the first time I’ve ever seen Charlie Sheen younger than 30 years old. When I saw the year of this film, I said to myself; “Sweet. This looks like an old and boring war film!” but after finishing it, I really liked it. There was some pretty graphical scenes in this movie too but I did enjoy it.
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