Platoon Reviews
Top Critic
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Total Film
The grisly reality is brought to life by Stone's dialogue and emotion-charged combat scenes, raising thought-provoking questions of morality in this still-resonant classic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
The Nation
Vietnam seems to have made [Stone] a better filmmaker -- his next movies should tell us whether, in the best war-movie tradition, it's also made a man out of him.
Movie Metropolis
Stone, who's known for his excess, offers a few voiceover lines that border on the cheesy, but other than that it's a pretty straightforward realistic tour of duty. And that's what makes it so powerful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Groucho Reviews
Remains an intriguing blend of the political and the personal, with Stone turning his memories and his opinions about Vietnam into potent drama. [Blu-ray]
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Common Sense Media
No war movie is truly an anti-war movie, but PLATOON comes close, and it's still as powerful as it was decades ago.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Platoon is different. It matters.
Film4
The first and best of Stone's Vietnam trilogy, it's also one of his finest pieces of work.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Arizona Daily Star
Most war films adhere to a big-picture purview, explaining which battles meant what and fulfilled which strategic objectives. Stone's effort skirts all that in favor of wrapping the viewer in visceral detail.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Cinema Sight
A terrific film from a filmmaker long absent from his art, Platoon is a frightening and challenging look into the battlefield operations of Vietnam.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Stone's eye-blistering images possess an awesome power, which sets the senses reeling and leaves the mind disturbed.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
... excellent ... elegiac and poetry-stuffed
Full Review
| Original Score: 94/100
EmanuelLevy.Com
Mixing realistic reportage of combat with more conventional morality play (the narrative strategy of all his films), Stone employs the two sergeants (Berenger and Dafoe) as realistic soldiers as well as broader symbols of Good and Evil.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Town Talk (Alexandria, LA)
Stone takes us into the hell that was the Vietnam War and turns out a provocative film.
| Original Score: 4/5
Spirituality and Practice
A tour de force with excellent ensemble performances by the full cast, Platoon succeeds in conveying the multi-dimensional reality of the Vietnam War
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
