Platoon 1986

Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune: There are images in Platoon so powerful that they seem, rather than simply imprinted on celluloid, to have been burned into memory. Read more

Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune: Platoon is filled with one fine performance after another, and one can only wish that every person who saw the cartoonish war fantasy that was Rambo would buy a ticket to Platoon and bear witness to something closer to the truth. Read more

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune: ...it's still the standard against which all other movies about the Vietnam War are judged. Read more

Sheila Benson, Los Angeles Times: This is movie-making with a zealot's fervor. Read more

Jay Boyar, Orlando Sentinel: Stone's strongest suit, however, isn't so much realism as it is his way of blending immediacy and insight. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: Precisely because Stone forces you to experience a grunt's tunnel vision and rage, Platoon is a film of inspiring empathy and awesome force. Curiously, that same tunnelvision in the end compromises Platoon. Read more

Vincent Canby, New York Times: Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book Dispatches. Read more

Pat Graham, Chicago Reader: For all the purported naturalism, the film seems resolutely schematic, and the attitudes shaping the drama are far from open-ended. Read more

Pauline Kael, New Yorker: I know that Platoon is being acclaimed for its realism, and I expect to be chastened for being a woman finding fault with a war film. But I've probably seen as much combat as most of the men saying, 'This is how war is.' Read more

Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News: This film is an act of courage. Stone, the gutsy writer-director, records in a devastating barrage of images the relentless horror and the senseless carnage experienced by far too many Americans in Vietnam. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Platoon is one of those movies that, once seen, will never be forgotten, and, at least for those who were not in Vietnam, will forever alter the way in which the war is considered. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: A film that says...that before you can make any vast, sweeping statements about Vietnam, you have to begin by understanding the bottom line, which is that a lot of people went over there and got killed, dead, and that is what the war meant for them. Read more

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: Platoon is different. It matters. Read more

Nigel Floyd, Time Out: Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Variety: The artistic veneer Stone applies, along with the simpy narration provided for Sheen in the way of letters to his grandmother, detract significantly from the work's immediacy. Read more

Paul Attanasio, Washington Post: The movie is beautifully written (by Stone), constructed with strong, clean lines, immaculately paced and regularly surprising. Read more

Rita Kempley, Washington Post: Platoon is like the Wall -- a dark and unforgettable memorial to the dead of Vietnam and an awesome requiem to the eternity of war. Read more