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In the industry, Stone's old colleagues and fellow directors have laid on their benedictions. Woody Allen calls it a "fine movie, an excellent movie." Says Steven Spielberg: "It is more than a movie; it's like being in Viet Nam. Platoon makes you feel you've been there and never want to go back." James Woods, who starred in Stone's previous film, Salvador, calls him an "artist whose vision transcends politics. Everyone from the ex-hippie to the ex-grunt can be moved by Platoon. And his passion isn't bogus -- he doesn't play Imagine at the end of the film to break people's hearts." Brian De Palma, who filmed Scarface from a Stone script, sees him achieving a volcanic maturity in Platoon: "He has now channeled his feeling and energy into a cohesive dramatic work. He's an auteur making a movie about what he experienced and understands. Seeing Platoon get through the system makes the soul feel good."
With its critical, popular and insider acclaim swelling, Platoon began to shoulder its way toward the front rank of Oscar favorites. By now it would have to be counted as the front runner, and Hollywood is furrowing its back with self-congratulatory pats for making this big bold message movie. To Stone, Hollywood's claim of paternity for Platoon must seem a rich joke. He and Hollywood both know that Platoon -- like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, The Killing Fields and nearly all the serious movies about the war in Southeast Asia -- secured its major financing from foreign producers. "It was a picture we wanted to support," says John Daly, chairman of Britain's Hemdale Pictures, which also produced Salvador. "We respect Oliver's passions. Besides, he spent only $6 million on Platoon" -- about half the budget of a typical Hollywood film.
The typical film, though, does not provoke a political free-for-all. Many conservatives have taken up arms against Platoon. In the far-right Washington Times' Insight magazine, John Podhoretz castigates it as "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." The film, he says, "blackens the name and belittles the sacrifice of every man and woman who served the United States in the Viet Nam War (including Stone)." Politicians are eager to return the salvos. Former Senator Gary Hart, aware of the electorate's fondness for presidential candidates with movie credentials, campaigns for the film by urging that "every teenager in America should see Platoon."
Now ask a man who's been there: David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times and, in The Best and the Brightest, documented two Administrations' slides into the Big Muddy. "Platoon is the first real Viet Nam film," Halberstam proclaims, "and one of the great war movies of all time. The other Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and politically accurate. It understands something that the architects of the war never did: how the foliage, the thickness of the jungle, negated U.S. technological superiority. You can see how the forest sucks in American soldiers; they just disappear. I think the film will become an American classic. Thirty years from now, people will think of the Viet Nam War as Platoon."