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3. The film doesn't say what a platoon actually is. It's a group of people, but how many? I know a tank platoon has four tanks, but people aren't tanks - I know this for a fact.

2a. Although the film is supposedly about the Vietnam War, it's actually a bit like Oliver Twist, in that it's about an innocent who falls under the influence of a nice person and a nasty person in that order. Willem DaFoe plays the nice person, whilst Tom Berenger plays the nasty person - we know he's nasty, because he has a facial scar, and a bunch of sidekicks who seem like something from a Walt Disney film.

b. In common with a lot of Oliver Stone films, there's a bit where everybody takes drugs. The 'good guys' smoke a lot of mari-ju-hana and listen to Jefferson Airplane, whilst the 'bad guys' are into cigarettes and beer and listen to C&W.

c. In the end, this hurts the film. We're supposed to think that the people who are smoking mari-ju-hana are good, because mari-ju-hana is a good drug, whereas we're supposed to think that the people smoking tobacco are bad because tobacco is a bad drug, at least in the mind of Oliver Stone. Further evidence that the 'bad guys' are bad include a liking for the Indy 500 and 'pussy', both of which mean that they must be uncultured ruffians, unlike Charlie Sheen's character who, being middle-class and college-educated - just like Oliver Stone, in fact - is presumably white as the driven snow.
Heck, I like cars, and I like cats, and I'm not uncultured. I was taken to the theatre once to see Worzel Gummidge when I was a kid and I know most of the words to Hey Jude.
Willem DaFoe's character seems too nice to actually be a real Sergeant in an actual war, and although Tom Berenger's character has a facial scar and swears a lot (in a bad way), he doesn't seem to be any worse than how I imagine a real Sergeant to be.
I was never in a war, by the way, and I probably never will be. I'm very unfit and fast approaching the upper age limit for soldiers. Lots of people in the world would probably love to swap places with me but I'm still unhappy.
In any case, both of them are trained killing machines - when they shoot down the Viet Cong, the film treats them, equally, as if the Viet Cong are a deeper evil.
I don't get Oliver Stone. He's either extraordinarily clever, or not nearly as clever as he appears. I suspect that he's quite smart, but unable to unleash this smartness without ruining it by showing off with sentimentality and obviousness.

9. Another thing that hurts the film is that it's not real. At the time, there were lots of television documentaries about the war, such as Once in My Lai, and the real-life footage of burning villages had become so familiar to me that, by the time I saw Platoon (on video, in the early-90s), it seemed unspectacular, disjointed, and a bit dull.
This is one of those Yellow Submarine things. When I was younger I thought that Platoon was a bit dull, and not all that good. As I grew up, I read about how it was an Oscar-winning classic, and I came to believe that I must have been mistaken in my earlier opinion. But now that I see the film again, I realise that I was right first time. It has its moments, and a few good lines (but, as with Full Metal Jacket, they sound staged and fake, and remind us that we're watching actors read out dialogue that was written down on paper), but in the end it's simplistic and a bit dull, and doesn't make me feel anything about the Vietnam War that I didn't feel already.
(after writing this lot I went back and read a review of the film by Pauline Kael, who was a famous film critic and also quite grumpy a lot of time, presumably becase, as a woman, nobody took her seriously and I should imagine a lot of people made jokes about pre-menstrual tension when she gave a film a bad review and they probably thought she was sleeping with the directors of the films to which she gave good reviews, or wanted to sleep with them. It must be shit being a woman.
She said that "just about everything in Platoon is too explicit, and is so heightened that it can numb you and make you feel jaded". Judging by Natural Born Killers, this is a fault of Oliver Stone and not just Platoon).

9. I don't want to go on about how much I hate Oliver Stone, because I don't hate Oliver Stone, but there's a bit where the platoon visits a Vietnamese village and gets up to all kinds of mischief. In particular, there's a bit where Charlie Sheen's character and one of the 'bad guys' abuse a villager who has a deformed jaw and thus appears to be grinning all the time.
It should be shocking. If foreign soldiers broke into my house and started beating me up, I'm be worried. But the way it's filmed here, it's hard to feel anything. It seems a bit silly. The scene is full of Sergio Leone-esque close-ups of people sweating and scowling, and, in a bit where Charlie Sheen's character fires at the feet of the villager in order to make him 'dance', you can see that no bullets are coming out of his gun.
At the time, I can imagine that people would have found it 'shocking' in a kind of 'not actually shocking, but we know that we're supposed to be shocked, because we've seen television documentaries about this kind of thing and the film's up for some Oscars so it must be clever' way.
As in a lot of the rest of the film, Stone cuts away from the things that we're supposed to be disgusted at. When one character shoots a pig, we see the pig, then we cut to the man with the gun, and then he fires and there's a squeal from off-camera, and the result is just laughable. Same with the unfortunate grinning villager. One soldier breaks his head open with the butt of a shotgun, but we don't see it happen, so we don't find it shocking. It reminds us that we're watching a mainstream Hollywood film that was eventually going to come out on video and be shown on television and had to cut back in order to get a rating.
It's the kind of 'shocking' that people talk about over dinner - "Darling, it was so shocking" - whereas if it actually had been shocking, really genuinely shocking, people would have either left the cinema or thrown up. And they didn't, they went to see Platoon and it was a big mainstream hit. They even made a computer game out of it.

9. I mean, there's a bit where bad guy Sergeant Barnes shoots a villager in cold blood. Everything stops for a little bit and we get reaction shots from people who look shocked, presumably mirroring the reaction of the audience. But it's not actually jarring in any way. It's as if the film is saying 'Look, this is terrible - these people know it, too, and Sergeant Barnes is obviously a bit mad. We can blame everything on Sergeant Barnes. He's just mad. The rest of the soldiers are okay. The war itself is okay. It's just Sergeant Barnes. He's the problem. If all the Sergeants were like Willem DaFoe's character the war would have been good.'
It would have been more corrosive if Barnes had shot the villager, and nobody had batted an eyelid. By telling us that we're supposed to care, Platoon doesn't let us make up our own minds. After that they torch the village and there's Barber's Adagio for Strings mixed quite high on the soundtrack, in case we don't understand that it's bad to set fire to villages. And then Charlie Sheen's character stops another soldier from raping a villager, but it's hard to make out what's happening because we don't actually see the woman in question, and in any case it seems a bit odd that Sheen's character doesn't seem to care when a man's head is split open (if he did care, we wouldn't have had that scene), but he becomes mortally offended when a woman is threatened by a minor character. It's as if Oliver Stone is telling us that the threat of rape is more morally-offensive that killing somebody.

9. As I understand it, both sides in the Vietnam War were as amoral as each other. The rural Vietnamese just wanted to get on with their lives, and didn't much care whether the government was composed of corrupt, inhumane capitalists (which it was - the Americans thought that they were the lesser of two evils) or corrupt, inhumane communists (who seemed to care little for the Vietnamese people that they were supposedly liberating). The Americans had machines to multiply their force, as all machines are made to do, but the intent on both sides was the same. For every planeload of Agent Orange dumped on their heads, there was a brutal purge of local villages by the Viet Cong.
The Vietnamese population was caught in the middle of an unstoppable force and an immovable object, and was bombed and gassed and shot and burned and starved for over a decade. 57,000 American servicemen died; over two million assorted Viet Cong and Vietnamese civilians were killed (there seem to be no separate figures), and another couple of million were forced to leave the country. The Vietnamese Boat People became something of a figure of fun in the West, as a lot of people over here found it hard to believe that the Vietnamese were actual human beings who would not attempt to escape their country in boats if they were not under extraordinary pressure.
That's the tragedy of the Vietnam War, not some American soldiers arguing with each other.
But there will never be a film about the Vietnamese people, because none of the countries that could make such a film care about them (I am average person, and I know for a fact that I don't care about them), and by the time Vietnam itself has the money to make such a film, the War will be long-forgotten.

9. Despite all that, Platoon has its moments. The most famous sequence - in which Sergeant Elias is cut off from the platoon, whilst both the Viet Cong and Sergeant Barnes advance on him, the latter with ambiguous intent - is extremely Hitchcockian.
Barnes shoots Elias, presumably so that he doesn't reveal the extent of Barnes' complicity in the razing of the aforementioned village - but, later on, Elias emerges from the jungle and tries to reach a departing rescue helicopter whilst under fire from the Viet Cong. This bit formed the basis for the film's poster, and it marred only by the overloud use of Barber's Adagio for Strings again. When I think of Barber's Adagio for Strings I think of car adverts. There was no way that Elias could reach the helicopter, either, but I'll let that pass.
And the final battle seems more real than most other war films, with the exception of Saving Private Ryan. Again, though, it's marred, in that the 'bad guys' get their comeuppance one after another as if the film was a cartoon - at the end, the one uninjured villain is told to get back out in the field and patrol, and the camera points at his face and he looks crestfallen, and I imagine a kind of 'wah wah wah' noise on the soundtrack, which doesn't help convey a serious message about the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, the 'good guys' get little vignettes to show off that they're still alive, because, not only do 'good' and 'evil' exist in films, the former always triumphs over the latter.