Episode 516: Platoon (1986)

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]An American Army volunteer [music] witnesses the horrors of the Vietnam War.

[00:00:05]Listen as we discuss the infuriating experience of buying concert tickets, what this movie has in common with heavyweights, and an outdated way of saying sleeping. Then we find [music] out if Platoon stands the test of time.

[00:00:20]>> [singing] [music] [music] [music] [singing] [music] [singing] [music] >> Hello everyone, and welcome to The Test of Time. I'm James Brief, and joining me as always is my buddy and pal, and the director of these podcasts, my buddy Alan Noa. How you doing, Al? I am doing very well, thank you, James. Uh before we get into Platoon, I wanted to talk about concerts. I feel like we discussed this a couple years ago, and a similar kind of thing is happening again, where artists are canceling tours because of low ticket sales. Post Malone, Meghan Trainor, Pussycat Dolls, they're canceling tours, and they call it blue dot fever. The blue dots are the unsold tickets, the unsold seats. Meanwhile, I've been trying to get Olivia Rodrigo tickets. She's playing Barclays in February 2027, and I can't. I can't get these tickets. Uh I want to take my daughter, and it's impossible. They sell out instantly. I do the Amex presale.

[00:01:46]I'm online early. I'm in the queue, and there's 100,000 people ahead of me.

[00:01:54]Right. I stare at the screen for an hour, only to say, "Okay, now I can try to buy tickets." And of course there's no inventory left because there aren't that many seats. Some artists can't fill venues and other artists, good luck trying to get tickets for these shows.

[00:02:14]It's infuriating. It really is just maddening. It is maddening, but I think it's probably going to be a good thing overall. I think the market is going to realize that there was this post-COVID need to be in live concerts and be around people and people are willing to pay anything that summer of '22, '23 to to be out in a music festival and and do whatever. You know, when our parents were kids, it used to be a little more than a movie ticket or two. These are real things. You see ticket stubs for Zeppelin and you know, big acts and they're $7 and they're $10 and then I think the market will realize, you know, maybe you should book a Terminal 5 and sell like 3,500, 4,000 seats every single time. You know, not everyone can do what the Eras I think they saw that word billion. It raised a billion dollars. She was giving out tips of 100 grand to every single truck driver who made that much money. Taylor Swift.

[00:03:13]Yeah, I was talking about Taylor Swift and I think people just saw the dollar signs in their eyes and you know, you know, Olivia Rodrigo is is a similar in terms of the demand for it, but I don't think anyone can really expect for everyone to be able to do this. I think it's probably a good thing. I don't know. I don't know that the market's going to correct on this because you have Ticketmaster, LiveNation, which is a monopoly. It seems like the DOJ case to break it up is going nowhere. Maybe some attorneys general are going to refile and you know, keep fighting the good fight, but they really control so much of the industry and you have these huge venues and smaller venues and in between venues, but it's an inexact science figuring out which artists can sell out which venues and maybe that's the kind of thing AI could be useful for, but clearly not. I just don't have a lot of faith that oh, this is a problem that's going to go away. It could be solved in one word. What?

[00:04:22]Congress.

[00:04:23]>> [laughter] >> Good one, James. You're hilarious. No, I mean, really. Everyone points to Eddie Vedder in 1992 or something. That was 35 years ago. And the problem wasn't solved. I I understand, but I think if you got somebody, a big enough star going again in front of Congress could do it. And I don't think it's wrong that you laughed, but the only way to fix that is Congress. But who would break up the monopoly? Who would break up Ticketmaster? Is that Congress or is that the Department of Justice? I I honestly don't know. Whatever department used to break up companies. And I don't think they've broken up a monopoly in a long time. You're not wrong that the government could step in. The current administration is not going to do jack [ __ ] And honestly, to be fair, the Biden administration didn't do much.

[00:05:13]This is why you need a president Elizabeth Warren or someone of that ilk who will go in and actually break up these [ __ ] monopolies. Honestly, I don't know that that fully solves the problem either because you still are going to have the problem of yeah, Fish can sell out the Sphere, Olivia Rodrigo can sell out Barclays, but what about a middle of the road band playing a middle of the road venue? It It's going to be tricky. I think people want to see concerts. I love seeing concerts. I'm always looking for shows to go to see, but the promoters and the people in charge of making these decisions have to do a better job at finding the right venue for the right artist, which I'm sure is extremely difficult. Also, the problem is tours are how musicians make money and kind of that's it. They don't sell music anymore. So, going on the road is really kind of the only thing left short of licensing, which is a pure shot in the dark. So, a tour that does okay in terms of profitability, that's not good enough for a lot of musicians.

[00:06:28]Well, I think the other way to do it is simply shut down rules about the secondary market.

[00:06:32]>> Oh, definitely. Definitely. The scams of selling blocks of tickets and maybe even the the artist they hold it themselves and then they upsell their own tickets on the on the secondary market. That bet only works when it sells out in an Olivia Rodrigo millisecond. It doesn't work when it turns out 2 weeks later you haven't even sold out all the tickets.

[00:06:51]So, all those things you inflated for twice the price on StubHub, it it just doesn't work. If you could pass a law that says you can't sell tickets for more than two times the price of the face value and StubHub's still going to take their 15%. It's really not going to be worth it for people to do that. That would be amazing. But, let's get into this week's movie, Platoon. For anyone who hasn't seen it, it's about Chris Taylor, a young American who volunteers for the Vietnam War and quickly experiences the fear, confusion, and brutality of combat. Assigned to an infantry platoon, Chris is quickly caught between two very different sergeants, the compassionate Elias and the ruthless Barnes. After a brutal raid on a village, Chris finds himself aligned with Elias, who believes that the soldiers shouldn't be murdering and raping civilians. Imagine that. But, the moment he has a chance, Barnes shoots Elias, leaving Chris without a defender.

[00:07:39]During an intense attack, most of the platoon is wiped out, with the captain ordering an airstrike on the entire region. Chris and Barnes are both hurt, and Chris kills Barnes. As he leaves Vietnam, Chris reflects on the war's true enemy, the enemy within.

[00:07:54]So, this movie came out 40 years ago in 1986. How'd it do at the box office, James? Uh this film had a very, very small budget. Uh in a $6 million budget.

[00:08:03]It opened in a small release on December 19th, 1986.

[00:08:07]Um but it wasn't on a thousand screens until after President's Day weekend of 1987. Amounting to grossing $138 million domestically. It had a couple of different releases. So, wildly successful, and hugely overshadowed uh the half dozen other films that came out around that time.

[00:08:25]Uh Michael J. Fox had one. Uh Casualties of War. And there was Hamburger Hill.

[00:08:30]While Full Metal Jacket uh did well, this was the one that won Best Picture, and drove a lot of what people thought about the Vietnam War for a while. Well, yeah. And there were movies about the Vietnam War before this. You know, there's Deer Hunter. There's Apocalypse Now. Rambo is about a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD. So, this was not the first movie that was critical of the Vietnam War, but it was the first movie, first off, written and directed by a Vietnam veteran, Oliver Stone. So, that definitely added some weight to it. And Rambo or I'm sorry, First Blood. That takes place 100% in the US. Apocalypse Now, that's based on Heart of Darkness, which was written long before the Vietnam War. And then, you know, they transferred the setting of that movie.

[00:09:25]You could say, "Well, that's just a tale as old as time." Deer Hunter, maybe you could say, "This is just some people who were affected by this war."

[00:09:37]Platoon is really direct in its condemnation of the Vietnam War, actions by many, not all, but many American soldiers in the Vietnam War, told by a guy who is [ __ ] there, and who had experienced the atrocities of war, and was suffering from PTSD. This really was a very bold, very direct statement that the Vietnam War was [ __ ] and was [ __ ] up, and Americans did [ __ ] up [ __ ] there, and that was a little bit of a controversial opinion at the time.

[00:10:15]This movie got blowback. The American military wouldn't give authentic uniforms for this movie. They didn't approve of this movie. They said it made the American soldiers look bad.

[00:10:26]Not totally wrong. This did kind of change the conversation around Vietnam, and apparently there were a lot of veterans who had a tough time talking about their experience in Vietnam, and they kind of pointed to this movie and said, "This is what it was like."

[00:10:42]The first half of the film, until the very end, has a lot of voice over where he's talking about writing letters to his grandma, and he has this quote where he says he wants to live up to what grandpa did in the first war, aka World War I, and what dad did in the second war. And you know, there's a lot of talk now about World War I, about, you know, what what a mess of a war that was, but World War II is one of those, I mean, it's going to go down the rest of history as, at least on the European side, good guys versus bad guys. Good versus evil, the Nazis versus the world.

[00:11:17]We have this guy here, Chris Taylor.

[00:11:19]He's not like some of the other cadets in some of the other films we've seen. He's a volunteer. Yes. Similar, I believe, to the first film in uh the Oliver Stone Vietnam trilogy. I believe uh the character in uh Born on the 4th of July is also a volunteer, correct? He [snorts] is, but that was the second movie. Platoon comes first chronologically. We did them out of order on the podcast. We started with the second. It was Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, and Heaven and Earth.

[00:11:49]>> Right. And that's from the point of view of uh a Viet- the Vietnamese perspective. Right. And Born on the 4th of July was co-written by Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic. It's Ron Kovic's story.

[00:12:00]And Ron Kovic did enlist in the Vietnam War. So did Oliver Stone. And Platoon is not necessarily autobiographical, but it is considered to be at least semi-autobiographical.

[00:12:14]Oliver Stone started writing it pretty much right when he got back from the Vietnam War. And he talks a lot about the fact that he enlisted, he volunteered, he was not drafted.

[00:12:28]And look, that was Oliver Stone's experience, and it's perfectly valid for him to write about his personal experience.

[00:12:34]I did find that the movie hit it really, really hard about how he was a rich boy coming in to this war surrounded by poor people.

[00:12:46]Not that that's a bad thing in and of itself, but you know, like we've talked about white savior movies on the podcast before, this almost feels like a rich guy savior kind of movie where Chris, the rich guy, he understands the morality. He knows that it's not okay to rape and murder. And a lot of these {quote} {unquote} grunts, the people from the poor towns, the people who don't really have a future waiting for them, that that's what he says in voiceover, like they don't know the difference between right and wrong. It felt condescending to me that he was looking down on the grunts. And I I part of my problem with this part, sorry to beat the dead horse again, but it does come down to the voiceover where Chris Charlie Sheen's character is waxing poetic about the grunts. And that's why they call them grunts because they do the work that no one else will do. First off, it does kind of feel a little out of character for this guy who just has landed in Vietnam and he's writing these letters to grandma and he's really just waxing poetic about all the soldiers in the whole war based on these guys that he's spent a couple of days, weeks with in his platoon.

[00:14:04]Yeah, I don't really like voiceover in general. I do feel like it's especially infuriating in this movie. It feels weird. It feels out of place. And Oliver Stone won the Academy Award for directing for this movie. He was nominated and did not win for the screenplay.

[00:14:24]In my humble opinion, I think he does a million times better of a job at directing this movie than he did with writing it. There's not a ton of dialogue in here. I just found the writing to be irksome and eye-roll worthy in a lot of places, especially with the voiceover.

[00:14:41]First thing I have to say is I was laughing a little bit at the voiceover because it reminded me of the voiceover from the movie Heavyweights. How?

[00:14:50]Because he keeps writing in voiceover, "Dear Grandma." And [laughter] he keeps writing talking about the camp. So, he keeps saying, "Dear Grandma." And I'm like, "This is not that funny film." But the voiceover completely stopped halfway through the film. And there's even a part where one of the soldiers, he's trying to cheer him up cuz he realizes he's starting to get like real depressed and he goes, "Hey man, don't you have a girl back at home?" He's like, "No. I don't have anyone back at home." And he goes, "What about that grandma you used to always talk about?" And he's like, "No." And you don't hear any voiceover until the very end when he's kind of gotten a little bit of his sanity back after that last battle when the guy's like, "Hey, man, we're going to R&R."

[00:15:29]There I think he's maybe on a I think they implied that they both got injured enough that they're either getting some R&R or maybe they're being honorably discharged. Yeah, they're done. Right.

[00:15:38]That's the only way that his the voice over comes back. So, I thought the voice over in this film kind of worked even though I thought it was a little corny, the letters to grandma. But also, it is a little confusing because he mentions mom and dad and he says, "Tell them I said hi."

[00:15:54]So, they're alive and there's clearly a reason why he's writing to grandma and not his parents and we don't really get into that. Which is okay, but it does feel like, well, I would like to know why that is. And yeah, the voice over kind of comes out of nowhere and then disappears and then comes back. It's a weird device and I don't really think it's necessary. I think the voice over at the very end about the enemy from within and he is born of these two fathers, Barnes and Elias. That's all there. Like, you know, like that's subtext that doesn't have to be text that's made explicit for the audience. I I think you get it. And I do think that along those lines the the battle for Chris's soul between Barnes and Elias in a way, it starts off, I think, as being a little bit non-judgmental in that scene with the raid on the village because the people who are team Barnes, let's just call it, they do make an argument that the people in this village, they're not innocent. They really are Viet Cong. Barnes knows what he's talking about. He's been around for a really long time. If he says they're the enemy, we have to trust him. And I think it's pretty clear that Barnes is the bad guy. He he shoots an unarmed woman. He holds a little kid at gunpoint. Even if you think maybe these villagers aren't as innocent as they claim.

[00:17:21]Clearly, he's still doing [ __ ] up [ __ ] >> Right. But, I feel like at the start of that scene, there's just enough ambiguity that you could say maybe Barnes has a point before it really just goes off the rails of like, "No, no.

[00:17:35]Barnes shoots the unarmed woman." When he holds the little kid at gunpoint.

[00:17:39]When you see Bunny, the Kevin Dillon character, trying to rape a villager.

[00:17:44]The movie does make a moral case and it's crystal clear who the good guys and who the bad guys are on the Barnes versus Elias front. Well, this is the village that they burned down, right?

[00:17:55]>> Yes. I I thought it was quite clear that the village is housing munitions cuz while it's burning, you see these huge explosions at the end. I assume those are those are munitions that people are hiding. Yes, but the villagers say that the Vietcong forced them to hold their weapons. So, then it's a question. Did the Vietcong force them to or did they kind of want to? We don't know. I think the point is it's irrelevant because there are ways to deal with this and ways not to deal with it.

[00:18:26]>> Right. Elias, at the very least, is like, "You know, we could do this without raping anyone and shooting anyone. What the hell's wrong with you?"

[00:18:33]Yeah. It's interesting cuz we don't know that Elias is a great guy. His level of morality is just simply, you know, he's not a monster. Right. Lieutenant Wolf, who outranks Elias and Barnes, he's incompetent and he makes a lot of poor decisions. His {quote} compromise is, "Let's not murder civilians. Let's not rape civilians, but hey, we are going to burn this village to the ground." Which is still murder. Like, when you think about it, this is an an isolated village. They're farmers. I think Bunny shoots the pig.

[00:19:05]They're shooting farmers. They destroy their food and burn everything down.

[00:19:10]These people don't have a bright future ahead of them now. Not to mention the trauma of these soldiers coming in and shooting people and you know, holding kids hostage and burning it all down. I mean, that's not a [ __ ] good compromise. That's not leaving these villagers with a with a stern warning.

[00:19:28]These people are [ __ ] It is worth pointing out that this movie was filmed in the Philippines. Obviously, Vietnam was not going to approve filming there, but a lot of the Vietnamese in the scene were actual Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnam War who were in the 80s living in the Philippines. And you know, we we can talk about the the behind the scenes stuff that Oliver Stone did with the cast and you know, it was traumatic for them, but it was also pretty [ __ ] traumatic for these extras who surely were reliving some horrible [ __ ] that happened to them during the Vietnam War.

[00:20:04]And let's get into some of that Oliver Stone behind the scenes stuff. Dale Dye is in the movie, he's an actor and he was the military consultant on this movie and he went on to do that for other movies, other TV shows, Band of Brothers and and he has a long list of credits. But the cast of this movie was basically given a two-week mini intensive training >> Yeah. in the Philippines before they started filming and it sounds [ __ ] brutal. You know, these guys got off the plane and they are doing military exercises. They are barely being fed.

[00:20:44]They are sleeping in the jungle. They're getting sick. I believe a Willem Dafoe got sick from drinking river water because there was a dead pig in the water. Dale Dye is like keeping them up at night firing blanks, you know, not real live rounds, but just scaring the [ __ ] out of these guys. They're exhausted and then they go and film this movie with Oliver Stone who has PTSD from the Vietnam War. He's yelling and screaming at these actors. They [ __ ] hate him because he's so intense. And I think you can make the argument that the performances he gets from the actors feel real and intense and genuine and maybe that's why. I think you can also make the argument that if they're good actors you don't have to put them through hell to get uh you know, those kinds of performances. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. I don't know. I'm not going to lecture Oliver Stone on how to direct, but it sounds like it was a really genuinely miserable [ __ ] experience making this movie. Yeah, that does seem intense. This is basically what Tropic Thunder was parodying, right?

[00:21:51]>> Yes, because Ben Stiller auditioned for Platoon and apparently Oliver Stone took one look at him and said, "You're cute."

[00:21:59]And then, you know, dismissed him because he was too cute to be in the movie. I mean, honestly, Kevin Dillon looks adorable in this movie, too, and plays a sadistic [ __ ] And I believe that Ben Stiller could have played it, but apparently Ben Stiller held a [ __ ] grudge. He made fun of Oliver Stone on The Ben Stiller Show years later, and then years after that made Tropic Thunder, which yeah, parodies Platoon and Oliver Stone and war movies in general. So, I think Ben Stiller had a chip on his shoulder because of that.

[00:22:31]Yeah.

[00:22:33]Uh I guess by the most famous part of this film and also which is kind of the cover of this film, basically is the Elias, uh Willem Dafoe's character, being killed uh by the Vietnamese. Elias disagreed with uh Barnes about the murder of the woman in the village, and he had told him straight up he is going to be a witness and he's going to want him court-martialed. And the higher-up guy had said, "All right, we're going to work all that out and I'm going to take statements, but we have like a fight in the field right now and going to go out and do that. During that fight, Barnes shoots Elias, seemingly kills him cuz Barnes goes back to the platoon, says Elias is dead, I saw him. They escape on the helicopter and who do they see running for his life and clutching his chest? It's Elias. Elias ultimately, he's outrun by the the enemy army. He's killed in war, but you you could say Barnes had him murdered. Barnes kills Elias. He doesn't directly kill him, but by shooting him, he wounds him. Also, there are some guys who get shot once and they're dead and some guys who get shot repeatedly and still are able to keep on running. Elias takes a lot of bullets and he keeps on going. It's the caliber bullets, too. I mean, if you get hit by, you know, a.57 magnum, I mean, you're going down. Your part of your body will be blown off. But if these are little small caliber bullets, that that could happen. Sure. And Chris says Barnes killed him and he's right. That is unambiguous. And then he kind of says that they should frag Barnes, meaning, you know, to kill him on their own.

[00:24:09]Barnes hears it and cuts Chris in the face, giving him a scar not unlike what Barnes has. We didn't mention Barnes is played by Tom Berenger, who is [ __ ] deranged in this movie. He is brilliant.

[00:24:22]I think this is a a wonderful performance. You know, when I think of Tom Berenger, I think of that other movie he did with Charlie Sheen, Major League, just because I've seen that movie so many goddamn times. But at the end of the movie, Chris ultimately kills Barnes. Apparently, that was not always the case. There was an earlier draft of the script where Chris didn't kill Barnes. Part of me was thinking, yeah, he shouldn't have. He should have just let him die from his wounds, just because I didn't want to see Chris turn into a Barnes-like character, you know, being judge, jury, and executioner on his own, but I do think that narratively it makes sense that that's his journey.

[00:25:05]He has his morals and ethics and doesn't believe in gunning down unarmed people, and then ultimately he's like, "No, no, I I have to kill this guy." And you can debate whether that's the right thing or the wrong thing, but that is Chris's journey. Justice is what he considers justice. Right, right, right. And it's a heartbreaking ending because Chris was idealistic. He says that this war shouldn't be just fought by the poor people for the rich kids like him. So, he wants to go and volunteer, and he wants to to be there, and everything he sees, everything he experiences is just so destructive to him. He ends up killing Barnes, this wounded guy, because he feels like he has to. It's tragic. It's a tragic arc. I agree with what you said. The last part I want to talk about is the character played by John C. McGinley, uh Sergeant O'Neill.

[00:25:56]He's trying to get on this R&R. He's trying to get out like a few days early, and Barnes isn't letting him, and he's like, "I got a real bad feeling about this night." And he he's right to have a bad feeling. Basically, the entire platoon gets killed. And the only way he survives is because he hides underneath a couple dead Vietnamese bodies for hours. The poor guy. I mean, can you imagine the nightmare this guy has after this? But, I actually don't even know if he has any nightmares because the next day when there's the aftermath, and he you know, he's like, "Yeah, I'm hoping to get on that chopper." And the head guy is like, "Nope, you're going out into infantry." Well, he's he's the only ranking officer left. Yeah. I feel in my head canon, I don't think he makes it. It's possible. I mean, talking about the intensity of the behind-the-scenes stuff, apparently in real life John C.

[00:26:45]McGinley was dealing with some personal stuff. His mom had surgery, and he really did want to leave the film set and go home. So, when you see his character saying that, that was born out of some desperation from the [snorts] actor. That was real and genuine. And yeah, he's one of the few characters to emerge from that scene unscathed. Like you said, yeah, he he's hiding for most of it. You could certainly make the argument that that was the smart decision. You could also say that that was the cowardly decision that he is not fighting and helping his fellow soldiers.

[00:27:24]Also, it is worth pointing out that there was some criticism of this movie in the way it treated some of the black characters. Not all the black characters, but some of them do not act bravely at the end. Junior, he runs out of the foxhole and then runs into a tree and knocks himself out and only comes to to be stabbed to death by a Viet Cong with a bayonet like in the chest repeatedly. It's an awful, awful death.

[00:27:52]And then Francis, he'd been injured before. He doesn't get injured in this this last attack scene. And then you see him stab himself in the leg because there's a rule that if you get wounded twice, then you will get sent home. And again, like the the John C. McGinley thing, is that cowardice? Is that smart?

[00:28:10]Maybe it's both. But yeah, he gets out of Vietnam because of that. And there was criticism that that some of these black characters fell into racist stereotypes and tropes that they were cowardly and not brave. And you know, again, the white guy, John C. McGinley did the same thing. But whether you define it as cowardice or not, it does show the desperate measures that people would take to get the [ __ ] out of Vietnam. They will do anything. They will hide under a dead body. They will stab themselves in the leg if that means you can get on that [ __ ] chopper and get home.

[00:28:47]Kind of a tangent, but are you watching Rooster by any chance on HBO Max? No.

[00:28:52]You should. It stars Steve Carell and everyone loves Steve Carell. I know you're a big fan of The Office. It also has John C. McGinley in a super super funny role. It's from Bill Lawrence, the guy who did Scrubs. Oh, cool. I feel like you would like that show. But let me ask you, James, what do you think about Platoon as a whole? Do you think the movie stands the test of time?

[00:29:12]I think it does stand the test of time.

[00:29:14]There's not much dialogue in this film at all. Like it's just very very slow and tense and when is the enemy going to fire? It's supposed to be a surprise. I thought the characters were good for a war movie with not too much dialogue. I thought I really got to know a good amount of the characters. One thing I have to point out, I thought it was funny from a test of time point of view.

[00:29:35]I know it's not Charlie Sheen and it's a character Charlie Sheen is playing, but to watch Charlie Sheen quote unquote get high for the first time. I just I thought that was funny. It's My >> [laughter] >> You know, by then I wonder what he was doing.

[00:29:49]Um I really think that this film is a very war as hell and a lot of [ __ ] goes down and a lot of brutality and crimes and murders and not just like killing the enemy. I'm talking about Yeah, he kills some innocent people and and maybe some kids are killed and and villages are burned when they shouldn't be. But I I I was surprised at how little I found that this was very specifically anti American Vietnam War. This could have been the brown team versus the gray team. You know, the Civil War. Just I think Oliver Stone purposely doesn't give much character to the to the Vietnamese. They never speak any English and we don't really know what they're saying, just basically what the what the translator is saying they're saying.

[00:30:33]Played by a young Johnny Depp. Yeah, right. By a young Johnny Depp and had you switched this to an Iraq War, any other war, any fictional war on an alien planet that you know humans are fighting, or or maybe aliens are fighting other aliens.

[00:30:47]I I think that this is a very well-done war is hell. They don't really even talk about why they're fighting the war. No.

[00:30:55]Chris says that they are fighting for freedom and their way of life.

[00:31:00]>> Like the American way of life. So they say that thing, which pretty much is the reason you tell every soldier in every war since the beginning of time. We're fighting for our way of life because the others are coming to take away ours.

[00:31:16]Sure.

[00:31:16]>> That's some generic stuff, but I I really think that this could be the Prussian war in some ways and the brutalities of that. I was just again surprised that it was so universally war is bad, and I was a little less surprised about how much specifically the Vietnam war in America's bad, which you definitely got more from Born on the Fourth of July, which is more about why did we do this in this war? Maybe it didn't wasn't for that jingoistic freedom freedom, or was it? And maybe they sold us something else, and well, they treated us and a lot of other stuff, but this one straight-up war film, very powerful, stands the test of time. What What about you, Al? Do you think this film stands the test of time?

[00:31:56]I do. I think this movie stands the test of time, and I don't know that I totally agree with your point about it could be about any war. I mean, yes, you're right, broadly speaking, but this movie is pointedly about the Vietnam war, and this movie was saying something very very specific about this conflict, about Oliver Stone's personal experience, and about an experience that frankly a lot of soldiers in Vietnam had. And while sure, you could tell a similar story about any old war, I think this movie is considered important because it is about Vietnam. And Oliver Stone was criticized as being anti-American because of this movie. I don't think that the movie is anti-American, but it is definitely anti the Vietnam War. And Oliver Stone certainly has the right to tell that story. I think that Born on the Fourth of July does a better job at telling a bigger picture story because it shows the soldier at home and the decision to go to the war and then what happens in the war and then what happens after. And so I think that just kind of gives you a richer story, a richer narrative.

[00:33:16]And this movie just takes place in Vietnam. That definitely makes it more narrow, but I also do think that it makes it extremely powerful and disturbing. It's hard to watch. It's hard to imagine being in that situation, but I think that's also kind of the point. I think Oliver Stone is almost daring you to imagine, what would you do if you were in this raid on this village? Chris, who's our hero, who's a good guy, who doesn't want civilians killed, he's firing his machine gun at that one-legged Vietnamese guy. And you know, he doesn't kill him like Bunny does brutally by crushing his skull, but Chris is firing a machine gun at his one foot.

[00:33:59]I think you're you're meant to to think, [ __ ] what would I do in this situation?

[00:34:03]How would I react? How would I respond?

[00:34:05]When Barnes is threatening to to kill that little girl, nobody says anything until Elias rushes in. And you see like Chris think about it and he's maybe going to say something, maybe he's going to intervene, but then he chickens out and then Elias runs in. You know, what would you do in that situation? These are impossible questions to answer, but I think Oliver Stone does a really, really good job of posing these questions and making you think again about the specifics of this war, about the general horrors of any war, and I found this movie to be really, really powerful, depressing as all [ __ ] hell. I think it absolutely stands the test of time. To be clear, I I didn't think this movie is a generic war film.

[00:34:51]I just meant that it's themes could be Maybe I should have said adapted to any other war, but I I I get I get what you're saying. But one last thing I have to mention is the musical score, specifically Adagio for Strings, sometimes referred to [clears throat] as the theme from Platoon by Samuel Barber.

[00:35:09]Wow, that is a great theme. Do do do do do do do It's just very simple but haunting. Right. Also, I mentioned Apocalypse Now earlier. Apocalypse Now stars Martin Sheen, Charlie Sheen's father. They're both these critically acclaimed movies about Vietnam, about the horrors and atrocities of that war.

[00:35:33]They both have voiceover, and they star father and son. Actually, Emilio Estevez was supposed to star in Platoon, and then the timing didn't work out, and it ended up going to his brother Charlie Sheen. So, just kind of funny thing.

[00:35:48]Oh, another random thought. In this movie, they talk about how you can't fall asleep when you're on guard. You know, and everyone kind of takes turns, and falling asleep is obviously very dangerous cuz the enemy can sneak up on you. But they don't always say falling asleep, they say copping z's, which just makes me laugh. I mean, nothing about this movie is funny, obviously, but I did kind of chuckle at that because that's just such an outdated phrase.

[00:36:15]Well, that's [music] going to do it for us this week. Come back next week, and we'll be talking about Logan's Run. That movie is celebrating its 50th anniversary. [music] I've never seen it.

[00:36:23]Have you seen that movie, James? Is that the movie where they kill everyone over 30? I literally [music] just said I've never seen it. I don't know. But yeah, I think you're right.

[00:36:34]But make sure you don't miss that episode. Subscribe [music] on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whatever podcast platform you like to listen to us on. [music] Smash that subscribe button. Visit our website testoftimepod.com. You can find all our old back episodes and write to us on social media. We are @testoftimepod [music] on Facebook, X, Instagram and Threads.

[00:36:53]Let us know what you think about Platoon, about Charlie Sheen, [music] Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Forest Whitaker, the Vietnam War, what this movie has to say about the Vietnam War.

[00:37:03]We love hearing from you and we'll see you next time everybody. Go cop some Z's and we'll see you next week.