OLIVER Stone's first and best Vietnam film, Platoon (World, 9.30pm), is a shattering experience. In the emotionally draining stakes, it is up there with Admiralty MTR station at rush hour.
Stone directed it and wrote it, later doing the same with Born On The Fourth Of July and Heaven And Earth. Critics saw the three films as a trilogy, but Stone never said this was so.
In Platoon Stone uses his own experiences in Vietnam to create one of the most realistic war films ever made, a film whose success lies in the mass of detail Stone brings to the screen. He captures, as precisely as Michael Cimino did in The Deer Hunter, the heat, the dampness, the bugs, the jungle rot and, most important of all, the confusion and fear experienced by the average soldier.
By rights the film should not have turned out to be the great success it was. Stone was strapped for cash and used a relatively meagre budget of US$6.5 million to bring cast and crew to the Philippines, where filming was completed in a swift 54 days.
The character played by Charlie Sheen is based on Stone. He is a green recruit and child of privilege who dropped out of college to enlist, and who finds himself in Vietnam as a member of a platoon divided against itself. On one side is Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), a horribly scarred veteran of several tours of duty. He is a morally corrupt, remorseless killing machine.
On the other is veteran Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe). He is equally skilled in the ways of death, but still retains some semblance of humanity and attempts to impose a sense of compassion and responsibility on his men.
Sheen is caught between these two in what he describes as 'a battle for possession of my soul'.