Platoon (1986, R)

Ok, I just finished watching Platoon (maybe you've heard of it).  ...I wish there was a way to indicate sarcasm in text.  For the purposes of this blog, I think I'll use red text to indicate sarcasm, facetiousness or any form of verbal irony.  Anyway, if you haven't heard of it don't worry, but it is kind of famous.

The movie is no longer available on Netflix streaming as of 10/1/12 which is next Monday, so if you want to stream it you'll need to do so by whatever time Sunday night they drop movies.  In my experience it tends to be some time in the wee hours I think between 1-2am.  I don't know if time zone is a factor but this is CST.

So the movie.  I really liked it.  I'd added it to my queue under a mental category I call "homework", meaning it's something I think I should see/have seen rather than something I want to be seeing (though there is often overlap between those two types before and after I see the movie in question).  Platoon is a movie about a group of soldiers (some might call it a "platoon") in the Vietnam War.  I had seen part of the film before, around in the middle and based on what I had seen I thought the movie was largely about the (I'll put it delicately) differences of oppinion between two sargents regarding how the war should be fought.  Having now seen the movie from start to finish, I'm glad to see that it was only one of several concepts/threads that was quite well explored in the film.  I thought the narration was cheezy, but that may be due in part to the fact that we've all heard that "war is hell" before and so this didn't come across as original.  Also, the movie was released in 1986, when this might very well have been a new concept to the civilian public, but I was barely old enough to watch Sesame Street back then so I would have missed out on this graphically violent war movie.  I'll get back to my main point and say that the overarching message of the film was the horror of war, especially the Vietnam War in which a lot of the "civility" of combat/engagement was out the window.  The movie did a pretty solid job of getting it across though the story told, the characters were well fleshed out and engaging, tension was solid.  So it didn't even really need the narration at all; I think they could have given a little more credit to the audience in that regard.

There was a great cast full of familiar faces who I'm pretty sure were nowhere near as famous then as they are now.  Forrest Whitaker (from The Last King of Scottland, though I'll always remember him from The Crying Game which I thought was phenomenal as was his rolein it, no small part due to the fact that I'd never heard of it at the time much less anything about it.  I'll say no more), Willem Dafoe (the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man), Keith David (the Thing, though his most memorable role to me was in Men At Work, which also starred Emilio Estevas and Charlie Sheen, and I love every movie I see him in), Charlie Sheen himself (Two And a Half Men), and John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox from the show Scrubs).  Johnny Depp was also credited as a featured face, but I didn't even notice him in the movie, so either he was a really minor role and fell to the background or he was just so young that I couldnt recognize him.  Must be the lack of makeup/eyeliner.
Yes the movie is graphic, but in places that I thought were fitting for it (unlike Tokyo Gore Police, the title to which is not misleading at all).  Some heavy language, but again it's what I'd expect to hear from partially educated soldiers overseas.  I thought it hit up enough different parts of the infantryman's life in the war to give me a fully-fleshed-out idea of what he was living.  I liked the pace to the movie: not dragging, not breakneck; had propper balance of characters talking (but not wasting the audience's time), situations with tension rachetting up, and firefights.  It does have some really tense spots (not a happy time period) so if you're a nervous/tense person, this might not be the film for you.  It runs around two hours, but dont watch the clock: I think I benefitted from not knowing when to expect an ending, so (like the soldiers) I can't really predict what to expect in the near future.

Is the red text idea stupid?  Am I not giving you guys enough credit?  I just miss being able to rely on tone of voice to convey it.  Anyway, if you have any ideas for it, questions or constructive criticism, please leave a comment.  (This spell-check isn't responding... I hope that means I spelled everything right...)  Ta!