Platoon review

 Number 192 on the top 1000 films of all time is Oliver Stone's war film 'Platoon.'

Platoon follows a group of soldiers fighting within the Vietnam War. The main character is the young, liberal Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) who quickly becomes disillusioned. His superior officers, the hot-headed and psychotic Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the more enlightened Elias (Willem Dafoe) clash on the best way to lead their troops. Keith David, Forest Whitaker and Johnny Depp all co-star.

Since I started this challenge, I've watched my fair share of Vietnam war films and I don't think that Platoon was anything special. It didn't bring anything new to the table. Sure it was entertaining and watchable. It was frenetic, fast-paced and dramatic, but there wasn't enough to delineate it from some of its contemporaries. I think a lot of that was down to the characterisation. The cast was large and confusing with the different characters not being clearly delineated enough from each other. In fact, the three main characters are really the only ones I can remember with any certainty. The heinous Sergeant Barnes was definitely recognisable, but all of his cronies blended into one. And Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen always stand out anywhere. And like with many war films, all of the characters are dressed the same - in uniforms and helmets only serving to make things more confusing.

Furthermore, the characters were all just so unlikeable. Okay, Sergeant Barnes is the villain - he kills a Vietmanese woman in cold blood and later tries to rape two Vietmanese girls - so you would expect him to be nasty. Barnes has plenty of cronies that are just as bad as him. But there really wasn't any likeable characters that you wanted to root for.  Even the protagonist Chris shows signs of instability, at times, blindly shooting at anything in sight. True, at times, he does do the right things like preventing Barnes from raping those girls, but there wasn't anything in him that made me want him to succeed. Part of that was down to Charlie Sheen. Honestly, I don't think he's the greatest actor in the world. 

The platoon's commanding officer was Lieutenant Wolfe (Mark Moses) but he was too young and ineffective to be any good. And another of the sergeants - O'Neil (John C. Mcginley) is a coward and spends most of the battles hiding in the foxholes. Largely, the film is just nasty people doing nasty things. I get it, war changes people. War can turn the best men into monsters. But it doesn't make them the most likeable of characters.

Platoon was certainly watchable enough, but I'm not sure how much I actually enjoyed it. It was just horrible people being horrible to each other.

The Experiment review

 Number 487 on the top 1000 films of all time is the thriller the Experiment.

An American remake of the German 'Das Experiment' and based on the real-life Stanford Prison Experiment, the Experiment sees two men try to survive in a brutal scientific study. Travic Cacksmackberg (Adrien Brody) is a pacifist hippie who gets laid off from his job. He needs money to travel to India with his hippy girlfriend Bay (Maggie Grace) so he takes part in his experiment. He and twelve other men become prisoners in a specially designed prison. Six other volunteers become guards. They have to survive two weeks while maintaining order and following the rules. But things quickly go wrong when the guards led by Michael Barris (Forest Whitaker) become power-mad.

If you haven't heard about the Stanford Prison Experiment, I would highly recommend looking into it. It was a fascinating if unethical study into authority and power dynamics. This film highly exaggerates the events of the study, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Much of that is down to the storyarc of the two leads. Travis is a moral compass. It's established early on that he deeply cares about social issues when he attends an anti-war rally. It is only believable that he galvanises the prisoners into standing up to the tyrannical guards. Conversely Michael Barris is a mild-mannered forty-two year old man who still lives with his domineering mother. Egged on by the more sadistic guards, the power goes to his head. Outside of the prison, he is nobody. But in prison he is the boss. And Whitaker's performance was menacing.

However, the Experiment was deeply let down by its ending. The Experiment is stopped on the sixth day after a full-on riot breaks out; the prisoners and the guards begin fighting with another. The catalyst? Travis demands to be let out, having grown tired to the abuse from the guards. Barris forcibly restrains him and a scuffle breaks out. When another prisoner intervenes on Travis' behalf, Barris kills him. Yet everybody is allowed to go back to their old lives. Nobody faces any legal or even moral ramifications for their actions within the prison. 

One particularly sadistic guard attempts to rape a prisoner, but he faces no consequences. Travis almost beats Barris to death, but in the next shot we see him in India with Bay. On a side note, Bay was a poorly-drawn female character. She was little more than a sex object.

And despite Barris killing a prisoner, he still receives his full payment as does everybody else. It was so strange that an experiment that focussed on respecting authority would reward disloyalty and disobedience. The most we get is the experiment's lead researcher being arrested for manslaughter, but this is too rushed to have any impact. 

Having said that, the real life researcher, Philip Zimbardo, faced severe criticism about the ethical nature of his study and he did pay his subjects properly, so the film was being true to life.

This did have the potential to be an interesting film about the nature of obedience and the power of roles, but it was severely let down by its rushed ending and its poorly written female character *cough cough* sex object.