Oliver Stone’s 1986 movie Platoon was a ground-breaking film. Based on Stone’s experiences in Vietnam, it was the first film about the war to be written and directed by a veteran. For this reason, it resonated more deeply with other veterans. Previous attempts to bring the conflict to the screen had not quite captured the reality of the situation as well as Platoon. The Green Berets, for example, was a John Wayne feature that was released at the height of the war, and its strong pro-American message and infantile action scenes did not go down well with audiences. In fact, in a novel called The Short-Timers (which would later go on to be turned into the film Full Metal Jacket), a group of marines are found watching The Green Berets, laughing uproariously. Stone claimed that the Wayne movie inspired him to write a more realistic account. Whatever he did, it worked. The film won Best Film and Director at the 1987 Oscars, and both Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger were nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
Fresh Faces
You will find some of the cast as symbols in the game, and if nothing else, this serves as a sort of time capsule. They all look so young! Willem Dafoe, Forrest Whitaker, Keith David and Tom Berenger are featured, but the full cast offers a few other surprises. The title character was played by Charlie Sheen, long before the days of ‘tiger blood’. His father, Martin Sheen, had played the role of Captain Willard in Francis Ford Copolla’s hallucinogenic Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now just a few years earlier. There were also roles for Corey Glover, lead singer in American rock band Living Color, and Fransesco Quinn, son of legendary actor Anthony. And finally, despite having only 3 lines, a young man named Johnny Depp managed to make an impression in one of his first roles. We’re sure he has a bright future ahead of him.
Great Soundtrack
One thing that the game is lacking is the movie’s extraordinary soundtrack. As well as an amazing collection of tunes from the era (including Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, Smokey Robinson’s Tracks Of My Tears and Merle Haggard’s Okie From Muscogee), the film features a classical piece, Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings. Set during Sergeant Elias’s death scene, the haunting melody really adds to the drama of the situation and that it is that scene, with Elias raising his arms to the sky, that became the film’s iconic poster.
Green Giants
The game does not have a huge amount in common with the film other than the use of the cast. You rarely see the enemy in the movie, and not at all in the game. And instead of the soundtrack, you get the every day noises of a Vietnamese jungle. While there is a tank in Platoon the movie, it doesn’t appear until right near the end. In the game, the tank appears as a Wild symbol, which awards you extra Spins as it makes its way slowly from reel to reel, across the screen. Whether this is an attempted metaphor for the USA’s slow progress in the region is unclear. What there certainly are a lot of in the film is the Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, otherwise known as the ‘Huey’. Over 7,000 of these were deployed during the Vietnam war, and proved an excellent tool for deploying and collecting troops. Line up three Huey bonus symbols, and a support team will come in to lay down covering fire while your jackpot accumulates.
