Tag: Oliver Stone

Salvador (1986)

Oliver Stone’s passionate denunciation of American policy, highly politicised but electrically made

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: James Woods (Richard Boyle), Jim Belushi (Doctor Rock), Michael Murphy (Ambassador Thomas Kelly), John Savage (John Cassady), Elpida Carrillo (Maria), Cindy Gibb (Cathy Moore), Tony Plana (Major Maximiliano Casanova), José Carlos Ruiz (Archbishop Oscar Romero)

To many countries the Cold War was very hot. The USA and USSR may not have crossed swords personally, but they were happy to funnel money and arms to governments and resistance groups in other countries to fight for them. The Salvadoran Civil War became another proxy battleground for East vs West – or rather Capitalism vs Communism. The US backed the military dictatorship, the USSR the left-wing revolutionaries. Caught in the middle? The people of El Salvador and their shattered human rights.

It’s not surprising this attracted the attention of Oliver Stone. Released in the same year as Platoon, Salvador is the second half of a one-two punch against the failures of American intervention. It was considerably less palatable to the masses though: Salvador is a furious, spittle-mouthed denunciation of American policy. Unlike Platoon where the victim is basically the innocence of a whole generation of Americans (an American tragedy), here you can’t fail to notice America is one of the bad guys. To Stone, El Salvador (as Richard Boyle points out in the film) was America’s chance to fight Vietnam again, only this time “right”: win it while sacrificing the lives of another country instead. It’s a considerably less easy to digest message.

Salvador is based on a fictionalised version of gonzo-journalist Richard Boyle (played with mesmeric intensity by an Oscar-nominated James Woods) who escapes from the mess of his life in San Francisco to cover the war first hand in El Salvador. There he finds himself growing increasingly sympathetic to the left-wing rebels, as the US-backed government forces commit atrocity after atrocity: mountains of corpses, assassinations and out-of-control death squads. And no-one in the embassy wants to admit to it, not when they are more concerned about keeping El Salvador from going Red. To stop that, any price is worth paying.

It makes for a passionate, angry but not subtle film. But then is Oliver Stone known for anything else? It hectors, it bellows, it hammers its points home. Stone’s writing is often a touch simplistic. There are traces of the unpleasant racism of Stone’s scripted Midnight Express in the scruffy, lecherous vileness of many of the government troops while death squad leader Major Max (Tony Plana) struts around like a mix of Tony Montana and Henry II, all but saying “who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” as he plots the murder of leading protestor Archbishop Oscar Romero.

It’s a film that lands punches that would have been better pulled. I could have done without the all-too-detailed recreation of the rape and murder of four American missionaries by a government death squad. Changing the names, doesn’t change the fact that these are fundamentally real people whose final moments are staged with a little too much queasy detail (or close-ups of their mistreated, bullet ridden bodies). But then, Stone is equally unafraid – and perhaps rightly so – to show us mountains of dead Salvadoran bodies, including children, so maybe it’s hypocritical of me to argue restraint for American victims.

Stone shoots the film with a real urgency and immediacy. Boyle frequently makes his way to the heat of the action and the camera follows him right in there. It ducks and sways among panicked mobs of people. It sees charges of horse-backed revolutionaries head towards it. It follows Boyle through devastated streets and scenes of despicable human carnage. It doesn’t flinch from executions and murders and when Boyle is thrown to the ground by explosions and gunfire, it goes down with him. Stone allows bombastic excess into the film, twinned with a score that adds a little too much classical self-importance, but at least his reasoning behind making this an overwhelming film makes sense. The whole ghastly civil war is overwhelming.

And so is America’s part in it. Aside from the ambassador – a Carter-ish hangover, played with ineffectual decency by Michael Murphy – the figures we see from government are heartless, cold warriors, interested only in the ends and caring nothing for the means. They pour money into death squads, provide air support and tanks for rebels to be strafed on the ground and are totally indifferent to morality. The media largely backs them all the way, parroting the government line and painting the revolutionaries as terrorists. They even suggest those dead missionaries were either foolish or mixed up with the rebels – either way fundamentally responsible for their deaths.

The government contrasts with the “ordinary” Americans we see. Missionaries down here to do good. And, of course, the cryptic figure of Richard Boyle. Boyle is, in many ways, a deeply unsympathetic character. Woods makes him selfish, sleazy and self-interested, constantly letting people down and taking what he can get from friendships and situations. But the things he sees in El Salvador reawakens his sense of right and wrong. He’s vile but he’s kind of brave. He will call out what he sees as wrong. He will protect others, instinctively covering those he loves when bullets fly.

And, finally, he tries to do something right, smuggling his girlfriend Maria (sweetly played by Elpidia Carrillo) and her young son back to America (needless to say, the authorities do not react well). Part of Salvador’s success is in seeing Woods perfectly craft a character arc that takes a man interested only in himself through to putting himself at risk for innocents. It’s a long road from the gonzo washout who drives down to the country stoned with drinking buddy Dr Rock (Jim Belushi, rather good as grungy stoner, sweeter than he appears, who grows to love the country and its people).

He’s a complex hero though, superbly bought to life by Woods in a performance that’s like a raw wound in a complex film. While Platoon could be seen, for all its loss of innocence, as a film where America was the victim, Salvador casts the country as the villain sharing morally responsibility for the piles of corpses Boyle picks his way through. Stone acknowledges the crimes of the revolutionaries – Boyle furiously denounces them for their shooting of unarmed soldiers pleading for the lives – but his real anger in this passionate, vibrant polemic is America itself. It’s delivered with verve, commitment and drama and helps make Salvador one of his best and most overlooked films.

JFK (1991)

Kevin Costner goes on a quest for the truth in Oliver Stone’s crazy but brilliant JFK

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Kevin Costner (Jim Garrison), Sissy Spacek (Liz Garrison), Kevin Bacon (Willie O’Keefe), Tommy Lee Jones (Clay Shaw), Jack Lemmon (Jack Martin), Walter Matthau (Senator Russell B Long), Gary Oldman (Lee Harvey Oswald), Joe Pesci (David Ferrie), Donald Sutherland (Colonel X), Laurie Metcalf (Susie Cox), Michael Rooker (Bill Broussard), Jay O. Sanders (Lou Ivan), Edward Asner (Guy Banister), Brian Doyle-Murray (Guy Banister), John Candy (Dean Andrews), Sally Kirkland (Rose Cheramie), Wayne Knight (Numa Bertel), Priutt Taylor Vince (Lee Bowers), Tony Plana (Carlos Bringuier)

When great events happen, it’s hard for us to accept they might take place for random reasons. Rather than freak occurrences or boring individuals, we’d rather see them taking place due to an impenetrable web of shadowy figures. There is something in us that rejects randomness and embraces order. Conspiracy theories are the (ironic) result of these, with their exponents often the most passionate believers in the all-pervading genius of big government. Events like the death of President Kennedy can’t be because some nobody shot him. Instead it must be part of a wider junta of baddies, with every man you see merely a front for a cabal of the wicked. It’s hard not to be swept up by the lure of the conspiracy theories (they invariably have the best stories after all) – and Oliver Stone’s JFK is perhaps the definitive mainstream conspiracy theory essay.

Taking the campaign of Louisiana DA Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) to find out the “truth” about the murder of President Kennedy, Stone’s film is part a fascinating presentation of half-truths and “might-have-beens” and part a sprawling mess of irresponsible nonsense. Either way it’s assembled with astonishing panache, a level of filmic skill that makes it (literally) almost impossible to tell whether what you are seeing is true and what is invention. Stone’s film superbly interweaves a variety of film stocks and effects to seamlessly splice together newsreel footage, Zapruder film and his own reconstructions so brilliantly it frequently becomes hard to tell which is which.

The same logic also applies to the script. JFK is frequently engaging and fascinating. But you have to remember that it is the equivalent of meeting the most literate and articulate street corner “End-of-the-Worlder”. Such is Stone’s skill he could, I am sure, have created an equally compelling film which would have you questioning the Moon Landings or the shape of the Earth. JFK throws an army of questions, objections and theories at the screen. And while it rarely provides much in the way of answers, only points that it wants you to think about, these theories frequently fascinate. Imagine JFK as a sort of video essay, linked together with dramatic scenes, with its points delivered by authoritative and trusted actors like Donald Sutherland, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

There is absolutely no doubting the technique of Stone here, or his mastery of the language of cinema. The work of Robert Richardson’s photography, with its myriad styles, and of Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia’s editing, pulling together a host of images, snapshots and flash cuts into an insidiously convincing whole, is breathtaking. Light in particular is superbly used, casting some characters in shadow, flaring up to (literally) blind others – light frequently plays across Garrison’s glasses, a visual metaphor for his own struggle to see the light. The speeches he writes for his characters are superbly done, and make their points with great skill – Sutherland (superb) has a hugely convincing story of military black ops action (and inaction) before and after the assassination that fills almost 20 minutes of screentime.

There are compelling arguments made about the ability of Oswald to fire the shots, the triangulation of fire, the spurning of an easier shot before the fateful turn, Oswald’s seemingly illogical movements after the shooting etc. etc. There is decent reasoning behind all of this, and the points are marshalled very well. But, like all extremist theories, suddenly it will turn into something just a little batshit (Lyndon B Johnson ordering the hit or some sort of cabal of Cubans, CIA, FBI and Secret Service working together to conduct a coup).

Much of Stone’s passion for finding the truth (the film’s mantra) is rooted in his own romantic view of Kennedy, as some sort of lost “Prince Who Was Promised”. To Stone, Kennedy would have withdrawn us from Vietnam (news I am sure to the President who started and escalated America’s involvement in it), ended the military industrial complex (contrary to his platform when elected of a stronger US military), bought the Cold War to an end (again, running against his sustained opposition to the Soviet Union) and introduced full Civil Rights (a cause he was lukewarm on at best – unlike his brother or his successor Johnson).

But Kennedy was a romantic figure who had the ability to invite people to invest him with whatever qualities they wanted (both good and bad), a magic cemented forever by his untimely murder. In reality there is no indication that JFK would do (or want to do) any of the things JFK argues he was assassinated for. But that’s all part of the magic of the conspiracy. Facts and events can be marshalled into whatever you want them to be. (Tellingly the only member of Garrison’s investigative team who questions these theories is shown to be a creep in the pay of the conspirators.)

So Kennedy can be a saint, and the film can outline (with no evidence at all beyond a series of coincidences and unlikely or random events) a grand vision of master schemers reshaping America over the body of a dead President. Does it really stand up? Well no of course not. But I will say it is compelling viewing – even if it is essential to keep an open mind about it. Stone later wished he had made clearer that much of the work here was pure fiction (and speculative at best). Certainly it’s a point to keep in mind.

Perhaps Stone should also have looked again at some of the other beats in the film. The film’s version of Jim Garrison as a kind of saintly campaigner for justice flies in the face of many (then and later) who believed the Louisiana DA a shameless self-promoter – an argument made easier to believe by the real Garrison’s cheeky cameo in the film as his ‘nemesis’ Earl Warren. No mention is made in the film that the case he brings against Clay Shaw was dismissed by the jury after less than an hour, and the film avoids explicitly showing his lack of evidence. Costner delivers the final speech, with its famous “back and to the left” commentary on what seems like Kennedy’s unnatural movement after being hit by a bullet and breakdown of the “magic bullet” (both theories now largely discredited), with aplomb, but the film puts a halo on Garrison which doesn’t really stand up.

But again at least it’s entertaining. Other parts of the film don’t even manage that: the baseline narrative that links up the various compelling conspiracy lectures is frequently dull, insipid and lamely written. Sissy Spacek has perhaps the most thankless role in film history as Garrison’s wife whose nearly every line is a variation on “Honey please stop reading the Warren Report and come to bed”. Even that though pales against the exploration of the 1960s gay scene in Louisiana (which Clay Shaw and his “fellow conspirators” were leading members of) which has an unpleasant stink of homophobia, playing into a host of deeply unpleasant (and false) stereotypes of gay people as perverted, promiscuous and preying on the straight. One suspects there was more than a little truth in the idea that Garrison’s fury at Shaw was at least partly motivated by homophobia.

These sequences work considerably less well today – and frequently go on far too long – but when the film focuses on its Kennedy theories it is at least compelling, even if it’s all rubbish. The film made it mainstream to believe Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy in which Oswald was, if he was involved at all, only a patsy. How different would the world have been if Oswald had lived and been made to explain why and how he killed Kennedy? But then chances are, being such an average an unremarkable man, people wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

Stone’s film is a triumph of agenda-led fantasy. Stuffed with faults it makes you at least ask questions – even if you wisely use those questions to affirm many of its points are questionable at best. But any film buff will love the skill it’s told with and the beauty of its technical assembly. Costner was perhaps a little too bland to drive the thing along (although the film uses his innate morality very well), but there are several good performances not least from Gary Oldman who is brilliant as put-upon, used but unknowable Oswald. Nuts, crazy and packed with compelling nonsense, it at least always encourages you to find out more about the actual history.

Nixon (1995)

Anthony Hopkins triumphs as Nixon in Oliver Stone’s surprisingly sympathetic biopic

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Richard Nixon), Joan Allen (Pat Nixon), James Woods (HR Haldeman), Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig), Larry Hagman (“Jack Jones”), Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt), Dan Hedaya (Trini Cardoza), Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover), Madeline Kahn (Martha Mitchell), EG Marshall (John Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler), David Hyde Pierce (John Dean), Paul Sorvino (Henry Kissinger), Mary Steenburgen (Hannah Nixon), JT Walsh (John Ehrlichman), Sam Waterston (Richard Helms), Brian Bedford (Clyde Tolson), Tom Bower (Francis Nixon), Kevin Dunn (Charles Colson), Annabeth Gish (Julie Nuxon), Tom Goldwyn (Harold Nixon), Saul Rubinek (Herbert G Klein)

In 1995, there was one person the chronicler of the 1970s American experience, Oliver Stone, hadn’t covered: Richard M Nixon. The man who was the embodiment of the dark scar on the American consciousness, the grim, unlovable presence behind the war in Vietnam, the protests and the deep, never-ending wound of Watergate, who seemed to drag the country further and further into the abyss. The man who besmirched the office, the least popular president ever, the national shame. With Stone’s searing attacks on everything from Vietnam policy to the conspiracies behind the Kennedy assassination, you’d expect his film on Nixon to be a condemnation. What people didn’t expect was a film as strikingly even-handed as this, which recasts Nixon not as a gloating villain, but a Shakespearean figure, a Greek tragedy of a man destroyed by chronic character flaws.

Opening with a crushed Nixon, like a drunken Gollum cradling his precious, listening to his precious tapes in the bowels of the White House during his final days in office, the film is told in a fascinatingly non-linear style – loosely falling into two acts, cutting backwards and forwards in time. The first act covers most of Nixon’s career up to the presidency, focusing on his Quaker childhood and the influence of his mother Hannah (Mary Steenburgen), his defeat in the 1960 election to Kennedy and his years rebuilding his political standing. The second half takes a more linear approach, covering a Presidency becoming increasingly bogged down in the inept cover-up of Watergate and increasingly desperate attempts to save his presidency, intermixed with foreign policy successes.

What is really striking is that Stone’s movie finds a great deal of sympathy for this troubled and complex man. He’s a man who has greatness in his grasp, dedicated, intelligent and with vision – but fatally undermined by self-loathing, self-pity and a bubbling resentment about not having the love of the people. Like Lear raging against the storm, or Macbeth bemoaning the impact of his vile deeds, Stone’s Nixon becomes a sympathetic figure, even while the film makes no apologies for his actions, his aggressive bombing of Cambodia (the film notes at its end the bombing led directly to the massacres of the Khmer Rouge) or his failures to claim any responsibility for how he caused his own end.

Stone’s empathetic vision of Nixon is shaped largely by Anthony Hopkins’ titanic performance in the lead role. Hopkins makes no real effort – beyond teeth and hair – to look like Nixon, but brilliantly embodies Nixon’s awkward physicality and, above all, his angry, bitter, resentful personality. It’s not an imitation, but it totally captures him. Hopkins has got it, and the disintegration of Nixon over the course of the film into the shambling, miserable, twitching, even slightly unhinged mess he became in the final days of his presidency is astounding.

It works because Hopkins never loses sense of the potential for greatness in Nixon – sure he’s socially awkward (Hopkins superbly captures Nixon’s awkward grin, his stumbling nervousness in conversation), but politically he’s assured, confident and has huge insight into realpolitik. His flaw is that he wants to be both the master politician and the people’s champ, to be Nixon and JFK, to have the people cheer him to the rafters. It’s a longing that turns to resentment, fuelling insecurity and fear, that causing him to be so afraid of being cheated that he cheats first and bigger.

It’s that potential for greatness that swims through Stone’s masterfully made, electric film. Stone’s love for mixing film stock, fake newsreel footage, snazzy camerawork, switching colour stock, stylistically eclectic sound and music choices and bombastic lecturing comes to the fore here – and I accept it won’t be for everyone. But for me it works. It’s a big, dramatic movie because it covers an epic theme. From its early echoes of Citizen Kane – the White House as Xanadu, those missing 18 ½ minutes of the tape Nixon’s “Rosebud” – through to the accelerated pace and film stock as events spiral out of the President’s control, it’s an explosion of style that really works, even if there are points which are too on-the-nose (a scene where Nixon’s dinner talk of war is interrupted by a steak that leaks gallons of blood as he cuts into it, is clumsy in the extreme).

Stone’s theories revolve around the true villain being the government-financial power system itself, a grindingly oppressive beast chews up and spits out the men who think they can ride it. Nixon may know about the danger of the system, but he’s as powerless as anyone else. Its tendrils extend everywhere, from the creepily domineering CIA chief Helms (Sam Waterston, unsettlingly intimidating in scenes restored in the director’s cut) to the shady Texan money interests (led by an excellent Larry Hagman of all people) who sure-as-shit want to get rid of that liberal, Cuban surrender monkey Kennedy, by any means necessary (“Say Kennedy dont run in 64?”).

Nixon wants to control it, to do some good – and the film is excellent at stressing how Nixon’s poverty-filled Quaker background gave him a drive to achieve but also a chippy insecurity and moral standards from his imperious mother he can never hope to meet – but what hope does he have? In any case, his own deep moral failings doom any chance of forging his own goals, sucking him into a quagmire where long-running dirty deeds, shady deals and unedifying company consume him. “When they look at you they see what want to be. When they look at me they see what they are” Nixon complains to the painting of Kennedy, the rival whom he can never eclipse, the man born with all the advantages Nixon never had, the millionaire embraced by the people while the working-class Nixon is reviled. It’s these resentments that consume and destroy Nixon, and Stone presents this as an epic tragedy of a great politician, crushed by his fundamentally human flaws.

Around Hopkins, Stone assembles a brilliant cast. Joan Allen is superb as Nixon’s loving but insightful wife who won’t shy to speak truth to power. James Woods is perfect as the bullishly aggressive, fiercely loyal Haldeman. Paul Sorvino does a wonderfully arch impersonation of Kissinger, always keeping his distance. David Hyde Pierce makes a smoothly innocent but determinedly self-preserving John Dean, Powers Boothe a wonderful cold Alexander Haig. Only Bob Hoskins gives a performance slightly too broad as Hoover – but he still laces the role with a crackling menace.

Nixon is a great film, an explosion of style (perhaps at times a little too much), which painstakingly strips bare the President’s psyche – his doubt, guilt, bitterness, resentments and finally overwhelming self-pity. Powered by a titanically well-observed performance by Anthony Hopkins, who is just about perfect in every frame – every nuance feels real – Nixon is a wallow in the dark underbelly of America, which hints throughout at the even greater dangers that lie under the surface, the powerful system maintaining the status quo that sees presidents come and go, but never allows any real change. It’s a remarkable film.

Platoon (1986)

Charlie Sheen goes to war in Oliver Stone’s Oscar winning Vietnam film Platoon

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Charlie Sheen (Chris Taylor), Tom Berenger (Sgt Barnes), Willem Dafoe (Sgt Elias), Kevin Dillon (Bunny), Keith David (King), Forest Whitaker (Big Harold), Mark Moses (Lt Wolfe), John C. McGinley (Sgt O’Neill), Francesco Quinn (Rhah), Reggie Johnson (Junior), Johnny Depp (Lerner)

Vietnam has been a long-standing scar on the American psyche. For over 12 years, American soldiers were rolled into Vietnam to fight for something many of them were pretty unclear about. Vietnam was a bloody shadow boxing match for super powers to indirectly combat each other. American casualties were high, and the country that sees itself as championing justice and the free world ended the war with the blood of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians on its hands. Is it any wonder the country still struggles to compute this?

Before Platoon there had been films that had dealt with the Vietnamese experience. Apocalypse Now had embraced the druggy, morally confused insanity of the war. The Deer Hunter had effectively shown the traumatic impact the war had on regular blue-collar steel-workers. But Platoon was something different. This was the war on the ground, with privates and sergeants as the focus (many of them poor, working class and also black) – the lower rungs of American society flung into a war they don’t understand, in a country they can’t recognise, fighting an enemy they have no comprehension of.

Platoon throws the audience into the visceral, cruel, terrifying horror of pointless conflict, with a feeling that the war will never end. Stone pulls off a difficult trick here: the film shows a horrifying picture of war and killing, but combines this with successfully showing the adrenalin rush that comes from conflict – and the excitement of visceral film-making.

Oliver Stone had fought as a young man in a similar unit, after dropping out of college. Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is effectively a surrogate figure for the director, with the film crafted from Stone’s own experiences and those of his fellow soldiers. The film is a simple, intense experience with a straightforward plot: Taylor is torn between two potential “father figures”. One, Sgt Barnes (Tom Berenger), is a supernaturally ferocious warrior and martinet whom the men hold in awe. The other, St Elias (Willem Dafoe), is an equally fierce fighter, but also a hippy, nearly saint-like protective figure. Which of these two will Taylor side with?

Well okay it’s not a massive surprise really is it? The strength of Oliver Stone’s film is its visceral, bloody, impressive intensity. You are thrown into the midst of a series of terrible battles, interspersed with bored soldiers bickering or taking pot. At no time is the viewer (or the soldiers) given any real idea about what is going on, what the aims of the war are, what is really happening in the battles. Stone plays the film totally from the soldier’s POV. Battles are a confused mess at night. The location of the enemy is frequently unclear. There are no indications of any tactics at all. There is barely any leadership – Mark Moses’ Lt Wolfe is an almost hilariously ineffective moral weakling, who follows the leads of his sergeants. The soldiers (or rather the two sergeants) essentially operate as lone wolves, doing what they think best for any particular circumstance.

The film pivots on a confused raid on a Vietnamese village, as the platoon descends on a village for no very clear reason – apart from seemingly being pissed off that one of their number has been killed in the night. Nominally they are searching for Vietcong fighters. But really it seems like an excuse to let off steam. Platoon must have hit hard in the 1980s, as it doesn’t flinch at all from watching American soldiers committing atrocities. Women are shot, teenagers are beaten to death, a fox hole containing what looks like a child is exploded after a brief warning. The soldiers are all terrified, thrusting guns into Vietnamese faces. Above all Sgt Barnes feels no guilt at all at executing villagers in order to pressure the elders into telling what he thinks they might know about the Vietcong (who equally are largely faceless figures of terror in the distance stalking the platoon).

Where the film is less strong is in its plotting and narrative ideas. These are straightforward in the extreme, with Barnes and Elias almost literally as opposing devil and angel on Taylor’s shoulders. The film is clearly weighted in favour of Elias’ hippie mentality, his desire to preserve innocent lives and his caring attitude to his men. Barnes is presented far more harshly – even though his brutality stems from his own deep-rooted desire to keep his men safe, and his belief that Vietnam is hell and you can’t pussyfoot your way around hell.

Saying that, it’s hard to argue against Stone’s feelings that compromising your humanity is not worth it no matter the struggles to keep yourself and others alive. But these are (forgive me) rather obvious, even traditional points – and its part of the film being essentially a conventional morality tale with a breath-taking military setting laid over the top. The ideas in this film won’t really challenge you – and in fact the film itself is really more of an experience than something that rewards reflection.

Stone’s direction is extremely good – even though he at times falls too much into the trap of overblown, overly operatic visuals (Taylor’s final confrontation with Barnes in the forest falls heavily into this trap). Stone has never been accused of being the most subtle of directors, and there is no stone (sorry) left unturned here to get the message across. In fact Platoon frequently hits its points so hard and with such unsubtle force, that it actually leaves you very little to think about after its finished – the film does all the work for you, like an angry rant that goes into unbelievable depth of detail.

But the acting has a very healthy commitment to it. Sheen shows why he was an actor of promise before he became a self-destructing punchline. Dafoe is very good as the serene Elias – a man’s man, but one comfortable in his own skin, with a strange campness about him, whose courage extends to doing the right thing no matter what. Tom Berenger is hugely impressive as the cold-edged Barnes, who has had to stamp out his humanity to survive. The rest of the characters split into two rival camps following these different soldiers, and there are some fine performances here from some now far more recognisable actors.

Platoon was garlanded with Oscars, partly because it talked about the American experience in Vietnam in a manner (and from a perspective) that had not been addressed before. It is an important historical landmark of a film, even if it is possibly not a great film. A simple, at times less than subtle anti-war film dressed up as a war film, it will immerse you in the conflict and the horror – but I’m not sure it will give you as much to think about as it thinks it does.