Analysis of Platoon

In the movie Platoon, the author, Oliver Stone, tells us a story about an American soldier in Vietnam during the war. The story is mostly based on his own experience when he went there. Even though the story is fictional, he keeps it really realistic and the more close possible to what was reality in Vietnam. He shows how that war was hell for the soldiers we sent there and also for the local population. Oliver Stone produced Platoon to show his disapproval of the war in Vietnam, because that war harmed the American soldiers that went there and also the population that they were supposed to protect. To deliver his political message, Stone used different elements of a movie like the structure of the plot, cinematic techniques and characters. My analysis of this movie and its political message will be focused on its characters, mainly the arc of the protagonist, Private Chris Taylor, through his interactions during different scenes with his two sergeants, Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes. They both influenced him and we can figure out that Barnes represents the devil while Elias represents the Christ. During the movie, both will battle for Chris’ soul.

In the first scene, we see Private Chris Taylor arrival in Vietnam for his tour of duty in the war there in 1967. He gets sand in his eyes, a metaphor showing his innocence and how he is naïve at the start of the movie. After that, he sees some guys that are going back home after they had completed their one year tour of duty in Vietnam. He crosses them and he looks at them and they look at him. These guys are not innocent and naïve like they were before war, they lost it in Vietnam, and it allows us to foresee that it is going to happen to Chris.

In another scene, we see Chris and his platoon walk in the Vietnamese jungle and we notice that Chris has some difficulties because he is sweating, tripping and he has some troubles with his badly packed rucksack. His first interaction with Sgt. Barnes happens when he freezes a