This film was messed up. This film messed me up. Seriously. I was so mad watching it because I felt like I could have changed something, but there was nothing I could do. This is what the director intended, and I was blinded by it until we had a discussion. Charlie Sheen’s character is simply the viewing glass in which we are fixed too. We have no choice in the matter, and on top of that, we can barely do anything. Throughout the movie, Sheen goes from an all American middle class college dropout to a hardened war veteran who is really unsure if all of the events of the war was worth it. Those are the feeling I felt too. I wasn’t alive during this war, and I’m not too sure as to why it was started, but I just know that all of these people didn’t have to die for it. The viewer is the soldier that’s just there. You’re not really sure why you are there, and you discontinued a previous obligation for it, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re there with the gun in your hand.
During the movie, I felt myself getting angrier and angrier about everything that was going on, especially the village scene. After the village scene, I had that cold empty feeling you get after drinking a cold cup of water on a hot summer day. Where you can feel the cold moving slowly through your body. Maybe I wasn’t as mad anymore. Maybe I just had to accept what was happening. But this is what is was supposed to do. Too much in the movies that are produced about war do I find myself being sceptical about the actual situation. It just seems that they are made to be very farfetched. I haven’t seen Rambo II yet, but we’ve talked about it a lot in class. From what I heard, they pre package Rambo and throw him back into Vietnam? and have him go on a rampage and find his kidnapped friends. While these are things that actually happen, I’m sure it’s blown waaaaaaaay out of proportion.
The reading for this film was a very interesting one, and it had some comparisons to films that precede Platoon that deal with the same subject matter. It also reminded me that Oliver Stone, the director of this film, is a Vietnam War Veteran. He has been through all of this, and this is his exact vision of what happened in the war. Platoon was originally supposed to be Stone’s autobiography, but eventually got adapted into a screenplay which ended up on the big screen. I think that even though it’s not very direct, it’s still an autobiography. With slight dramatization, he showed the atrocities of war as they are meant to be shown. It was a really rough watch, but I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about the war.
Your entire first paragraph about feeling helpless is totally the way I felt too. I wanted to be able to do something or stop something and not just sit idly by and watch all of this terror take place in front of me... but you're right! Oliver Stone wanted us to experience this helplessness because that's what he felt while in the Vietnam War. It's an incredibly hard film to watch and Stone achieved his goal. Whether it's a complete autobiography or not, I felt like I was there and like there was nothing else I could do.
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This is some of your best writing yet. Keying into how a film makes you feel watching it is an important skill, especially when used analytically to discuss how exactly it is that the director accomplishes that particular mood--point of view, camera angles, etc. You write about your own experience very well--just take that next analytical step and you'll have something very strong.
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