Platoon is the landmark definition of a war film. Pulse-pounding sequences stacked on well-performed portrayal of soldiers (Sheen, Berenger & Dafoe) as well as a couple of heart-wrenching scenes that would be somewhat difficult to view. The film is Oliver Stone's most significant to date, especially since it's based off his own personal experience in the Vietnam War.

Continuing my plan to watch every Johnny Depp movie in order, I come to Platoon (1986)

The first of Stones Vietnam trilogy. Stone wrote the screenplay based upon his experiences as a U.S. Infantryman in Vietname to counter the vision of the war portrayed in John Waynes The Green Barets. Platoon was the first Hollywood film to be written and directed by a veteran of the Vietnam War. Stone fought for years to get this movie made. Studios didn't want to make another movie about the unpopular war and considered Deer Hunter and Apocolypse Now as the definitive Vietnam movies, and saw no reason to make this.

This really is harrowing viewing, but it's not only the best movie of 1986, its one of the best of the decade.

This movie reminds us, that before he became a tabloid fodder and punchline on late night talk shows Charlie Sheen was once a very promising young actor. His voice-over is eerily reminiscent of Martin Sheen in Apocolypse Now. Willem Defo, Tom Berenger (both playing against type and both Oscar-nominated) John C. McGinley, Kieth David (an actor I always enjoy seeing on screen) and Forest Whitaker are all superb.

The part of Sergeant Barnes was originally offered to Kevin Costner. Although pretty unknown and a few years away from fame, he turned it down because he didn't want to disrespect his brother, who was a Vietnam veteran.

Depp (his helmet reading, "Sherilyn", a tribute to Sherilyn Fenn, whom Depp was dating at the time) is OK, but he fades into the background against the bigger performances, despite a key scene.

Not only did Platoon win Best Picture and Best Director for Stone, it grossed $138 dollars at the domestic box office to end 1986 as the 3rd highest grossing movie of the year.

Many great war films of the Vietnam conflict are centered around these themes of blurred morality and the uselessness of war, and Oliver Stone's Platoon is among the most well known. Stone, who wrote and directed the film and also served as an infantryman in Vietnam, first rose to fame for his war films that dramatized the infamous Cold War conflict. The main premise of his magnum opus are the inner conflicts within US forces deployed to southeast Asia, rather than the actual physical conflicts between them and the Communist-allied Vietnamese forces. More broadly, Platoon analyzes the "duality of man" concept that has been studied in numerous other works, from fellow Vietnam War films like Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Apocalypse Now (1979), all the way back to the latter's source material and inspiration in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Platoon focuses on the moral decay of soldiers in American units, and how this contributes to their inability to fight their Vietnamese enemies. Charlie Sheen sums up this theme with his on-the-nose voiceover, "We did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves... and the enemy was in us."

Vietnam War-movies tend to be even harder to watch than most war flicks, as the lines between the "heroes" and "villains" are blurred more than in any other dramatized period of warfare in recent human history. In wars like World War II, which are widely known for being as black and white as military conflicts have become, the contrasting features between the heroic forces we are meant to root for and their opposing enemy platoons are well defined. That is almost never the case with the United States-North Vietnamese/Vietcong conflict in Vietnam during the overarching Cold War.

That is not to say that most wars throughout human history have not been many shades of grey, with the winners and losers not always corresponding with the righteous and evil. But because of the guerrilla nature and infamous legacy of the Vietnam War itself - namely, the immense public protest against American involvement - the Vietnam War remains by far the most unpopular war in modern American history. With that said, most of the film is fantastic, from the aforementioned narrative to the grim lightning of the southeast Asian jungles that emphasize the film's tone, to the poignant, melancholic score.