First a quick note: having seen two war films in one day, I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of them. I do respect their craftsmanship and some of the messages they convey, but for a war film to be serious it almost inevitably loses a lot of joy. There are fun moments, in both Waltz With Bashir and Platoon, but they are dwarfed by the serious nature of their subject matter. I haven't seen a whole lot of them, for this reason, but there's no doubt in my mind that while Platoon is a great film, I'd sooner revisit the more sensationalist Where Eagles Dare because it's so much more fun.
Oliver Stone's Platoon follows a group of soldiers on the front-lines of the Vietnam War. The film, deservedly I think, won a slew of awards in 1986. It is a brutal vision of war (a response, Stone says, to the more jingoistic representations of Vietnam that came before), in which good and evil are far from cut and dry.
