The 1986 film by Oliver Stone, Platoon is an unsettling and perturbing film with realistic combat that gets any viewer’s heart racing. Many now famous actors such as Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Johnny Depp, and so on were just starting their careers off, and Platoon was the perfect action film to garner attention to the rising stars. Stone put the actors through a 2 week boot camp in the Philippine jungle to make sure the film was as realistic as possible. The combat is brutally graphic, accurate, and heart wrenching; Platoon is strikingly accurate at showing the atrocities of the Vietnam war. Cold-blooded murder, mental illness, verbal and physical abuse, internal conflict, and many other devastating realities of war are only some of the many horrors are exhibited in Platoon. The ferociousness of combat and its effect on the mind of a person is ever so apparent in Stone’s film, and the constant image of bloody and maimed bodies is sure to engrain an image in your head.

I rate this film 9.5/10 with its only downside being some cinematic issues.