HAS ‘PLATOON’ DE-ESCALATED WAR MOVIES?

Nothing stays the same: war, peace, Hollywood or its audiences.

The artistry of some of Hollywood’s earliest essays on war--King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” in 1925 and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” from 1930 for example--remains impressive more than a half-century later.

Yet the ambiguity of the films about war made in later times is a far cry from the straight-ahead patriotic fervor of the World War II action movies, or from the clear and powerful anti-war sentiments of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

Wars are not what they were, and, 40 years into the age of television (and of universal higher education), audiences are more sophisticated than they used to be.

Vietnam has, of course, been a special case history in the Hollywood experience, as it has been in the national history. The one large film made during Vietnam itself, John Wayne’s “The Green Berets,” attempted to impose on the Vietnam conflict the kind of patriotic national consensus that was fitting and valid in so many of the films Wayne himself starred in during and well beyond World War II.

But, as was starkly clear even in 1969 when “Green Berets” was made, there was no such national consensus behind the Vietnam engagement. And Hollywood, which lives and dies by the mass audience and, therefore, most of the time, by finding the consensus, effectively avoided any large commitments to Vietnam stories until well after the pull-out.

Even the first of the major Vietnam films, in critical and box office terms, Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter,” proved to be curiously ambiguous in what it seemed to be saying.

About the nightmarish and even surrealistic nature of Vietnam there was no doubt. The paradoxes of a war conducted amid peacetime, and of modern technology held at bay by primitive guerrilla warfare skills, came across strongly.

Yet was Cimino hawk or dove, in favor of or opposed to the Vietnam conflict; was he anti-war? Was the film’s final scene, of the survivors singing “God Bless America” around the kitchen table, a profoundly ironic and even satiric touch, following as it did the carnage and the madness, or was it a proud affirmation of traditional (and surviving) American values, as Cimino later insisted? It is still not clear.

After the debacle of his “Heaven’s Gate” and its incompleted intentions, it began to seem possible, in retrospect, that the obscurities of “The Deer Hunter” were accidental, the consequence of creating massive visual and visceral effects that were not necessarily linked by a coherent script.

Francis Coppola has been quoted as saying that “Apocalypse Now” was not an anti-war film, it was an anti-lie film. Coppola took the peculiar and surrealistic nature of the Vietnam fighting even further than Cimino had, creating a druggy nightmare, hell with neon lights and surfboards and native arrows bouncing off a patrol boat. It was strong stuff conceptually, and it was a very long way from “The Story of GI Joe.”

The previous Vietnam film that seems closest in spirit and even in its climactic action to Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” is Ted Post’s “Go Tell the Spartans,” which was filmed for relative pennies in Southern California and had a fine ensemble led by Burt Lancaster. It was released the same year (1978) as “The Deer Hunter,” but was thinly distributed and found good reviews but no audiences.

In it a green unit is overrun by superior Vietcong forces, with only one U.S. survivor left to stumble by dawn’s early light through a (heavily symbolic) cemetery for French soldiers killed in their nation’s adventures in a hostile land.

The popularity of “Platoon” seems astonishing because it is so arduous a film, gut-wrenching in its suspense, ugly in many of its confrontations, depressing in its reminder of the wastings of people on both sides and its corrosion of the human spirit. It offers high-tension, dramatic conflicts, but none of the escapist heroics that make “Rambo” an exercise in make-believe.

It appears clear that although Stone himself volunteered for duty in ‘Nam, having briefly taught school there, he has since come to feel that the American involvement was a mistake. His equally passionate film “Salvador” makes an even stronger present-tense case against the Vietnam-like American involvement there.

Yet it may be some part of the surprisingly wide appeal of “Platoon” that it is not primarily a political statement. If it is a film of advocacy, it is what he says it is: an homage to the grunts he fought beside, a salute to brave men.

It probably will not dislodge those viewers who arrive with prepared positions, though any viewer must come away with an even closer awareness of what the fighting was like than the nightly newscasts provided at the time.

On his basic story of the seasoning of a young volunteer, Stone has imposed an almost mythic overlay of the battle, personalized, between a kind of good and a kind of evil. Yet even when Stone’s narrative threatens to become overwrought and oversymbolic, there is a saving sense that he is only trying to do justice to the overwhelming remembered reality.

There is now a slight critical backlash developing toward “Platoon.” Popular success makes critics nervous, worried that they may have guessed wrong.

One argument is that Stone’s own experiences in Vietnam did not guarantee that his film would be good. That’s true; it just is. The other notion is that you don’t have to have fought in Vietnam or any other war to be qualified to say whether “Platoon” is good or bad. True again; films work or they don’t. But if you’ve dodged one shell or several you have grounds for saying the sweats feel familiar, and the you-are-there credibility of Stone’s film is a crucial ingredient of its success, setting it aside from the calculated surrealism of “Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now” (both of which Stone admires).

What seems true is that “Platoon” now sets a standard by which later films about Vietnam and about all war will have to be measured. It is deeply felt but also deeply thought; it resists labeling, and finds the truth as complicated as life itself.