Hollywood delivered powerful combat stories about the brutality of battle, but nothing came close to matching Oliver Stone’s depiction of America’s tragic Vietnam chapter. This drama about an idealistic recruit (Charlie Sheen) confronting the savagery, the chaos, the true horror of war, was a searing corrective to jingoistic action movies like “Rambo.” In “Platoon,” the enemy is largely unseen — the Vietnamese soldiers masked by dense jungle — but the camera does not shy away from the depiction of the mangled bodies of the servicemen who draw their fire. Stone, who served in 1967 and 1968, was the first Vietnam vet to direct a movie about his experience, giving the picture greater authenticity.
Filmed for just $6 million and featuring a cast of then largely unknown actors like Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker and Johnny Depp, “Platoon” was a smash hit, earning $137.9 million to…
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