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Storyline
Platoon is a war film by Oliver Stone that is set during the Vietnam War and tells the story of young teenage soldier named Chris as he develops into a man. |
Backdrops
The Director
 Oliver Stone
William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American film director and screenwriter. Stone became known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had participated as an American infantry soldier. His work frequently focuses on contemporary political and cultural issues, often controversially. He has received three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), and Best Director for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). The British newspaper The Guardian described him as "one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema."
Stone's movies often use many different cameras and film formats, including VHS, 8 mm film, and 70 mm film. He sometimes uses several formats in a single scene, as in Natural Born Killers (1994) and JFK (1991).
Descr iption above from the Wikipedia article Oliver Stone, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
User Reviews
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Viewing Platoon for the AFI Project
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What's the AFI project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx
Platoon is on the following AFI lists:
The Original Top 100 (#83)
100 Most Heart-Pounding Movies (#72)
The Revised Top 100 (#86)
My parents are baby-boomers and, therefore, contemporaries of the Vietnam War. They may not have fled to San Francisco or to Woodstock and taken up residence with the flower-adorned counterculture in those places, but the times and events, I think it would be fair to say, profoundly affected them. For as long as I can remember, they have been willing, almost thirsty, to watch television and film concerning the Vietnam War. If it wasn't Tour of Duty or China Beach, it would be films like Apocalypse Now, and the last AFI-ranked film about this grisly war on the Original list, Platoon.
I admit, I have avoided watching this film for a long time. First off, I'm no stranger to Oliver Stone films, and the few that I've seen tend to leave me feeling heavy-hearted, achy-brained, and full of indigestion, regardless of the subject being depicted. JFK, for example, intrigued me for days; Born on the Fourth of July was my first Stone Vietnam film, and I was deeply affected. My mother, the largest proponent of Platoon, always touted its intensity and graphic visuals, so I was never eager to jump into watching the film. It finally came up on one of these AFI lists, though, and since I've sat through other unappealing films, for better or for worse, because the American Film Institute called themselves experts and decided to rank these films on semi-pretentious lists, ...
View full review
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reviewed by Pippin2010 (Filmaster.com) on the 30th of May 2010
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Great film, highly recommended!