Monthly Archives: March 2011

On December 24, 1986, Director and Writer Oliver Stone released his Vietnam War film Platoon, starring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe and following the directors own experiences as an infantry grunt in that war. Featuring excellent performances by the three aforementioned actors, as well as Forest Whitaker, Johnny Depp and Kevin Dillon, Stone’s semi-autobiographical record of Vietnam went on to win an Oscar for Best Picture. Six months later, on Jun 26, 1987, Stanley Kubrick released Full Metal Jacket, also set, partially, in Vietnam during that conflict. Based not on his own experiences in Vietnam, as Stone’s film is, Kubrick instead works from the novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hansford. Starring Matthew Modine, R. Lee Emery and a young Vincent D’Onofrio, the film follows Hansford’s “short-timers” through their brutal basic training and into “the shit”; the bloody street fighting in Hue, Vietnam in 1968. To have two outstanding war films set in… Read more