In the movie, Platoon, the US soldiers were viewed as the heroes, when really it was the Americans who started the war in the first place. They destroyed numerous villagers, murdered and raped numerous civilians, etc. The Vietnam War wasn't as clean cut as the movie portrayed it to be, neither were the conditions that they were fighting. Although this was not demonstrated, the Americans were just as ferocious and inhuman as the Viet Kong. But because this was an American representation of the Vietnam War, the US soldiers were exposed in a more positive light. The Vietnamese were depicted quiet accurately in sense that, Platoon showed how the soldier operated and how they received their weapons underground. Although, we as the audience did not get a good sense of how the Vietnamese Soldiers communicated, Stone, demonstrated how ingenious they really were and how they moved throughout the jungle of Cambodia. .
5. The film, Platoon, Begins with Chris Taylor's (Charlie Sheen) arrival in Viet Nam. The first thing he sees is rows of bodies being readied for shipment back to the U.S. With this being the first scene the narrator (Charlie Sheen) should have begun by introducing the Vietnam War and how the feud between communism and capitalism begun with the "independence" of Vietnam. Instead he replayed what his expectations were of the next few months. The enemy were North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong but you rarely viewed them except as shadowy figures in the jungle or momentarily illuminated by the light of a flare. There were no defined battle lines and the combat scenes lead you to believe that the enemy was everywhere. The line between good and evil was blurred or non-existent in this film. Sergeant Elias was portrayed as a caring, intelligent leader who escapes reality through the use of drugs. His nemesis, Sergeant Barnes, was portrayed as an efficient fighting machine who, will stop at nothing to get the job done.