Platoon vs. Full Metal Jacket

I saw the movie Platoon the other night, and I thought it was pretty interesting. Throughout the duration of the film I couldn't help but compare it to Full Metal Jacket. Both films are about the Vietnam War, shown from a soldier's perspective. Platoon features a more well-known cast (Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Forest Whittaker, Johnny Depp and many more) and was made a year before FMJ in 1986. Charlie Sheen in Platoon is a rich young man that decides to volunteer to serve his country. The story flows fairly smoothly, and I enjoyed this particular film over FMJ, and I'll list some of the reasons why.

1. Better cast list. Everyone knows that in war movies, it is extremely difficult to tell the difference between characters in a frantic battle scene. Lots of similar-looking people running around, shouting who know's what. I find this confusion immensely annoying. I thought Platoon was superior to FMJ in this aspect because their cast/supporting cast was much stronger. They skill of the actors in Platoon caused their characters to develop a little better. In FMJ, I didn't even know where Private Joker was half the time, and it was difficult to see what separated him from the rest of the people in his squad.

Also, another reason that Platoon was less confusing, and thus more enjoyable to watch for me was because of a simple, (but unrealistic) tool. Pretty much every single character had hair. They were all sporting movie star-styled full-length hair in the midst of the Vietnamese jungles. I was under the impression that soldiers all had crew cuts, and if not, very very short hair. I mean, the first 3 minutes or so of FMJ is just of a barber shaving hair off of various soldiers. But the fact that each character had hair allowed people to identify them much easier.

2. Storyline. I thought Platoon's storyline was more interesting, and less choppy than FMJ's. FMJ was like two movies, one while they were at training camp, and one during the Tet Offensive. Platoon followed a single plotline, and it was much easier to get immersed in the experience of the soldiers. When you are trudging through a jungle for an entire movie, you can almost feel the fatigue, the hopelessness of the soldiers, just from watching it for so long. You are tired of the jungle, and you are not even there, so I think this makes you feel more for the men. FMJ has many different locations, and there is never really much direct conflict, so it barely feels like a Vietnam movie at all.

3. Better action sequences. There really isn't much to this one, but I thought it was obvious that Platoon's action sequences were more captivating, considering in FMJ there wasn't much of any.

4. Better message. The message I gleaned from FMJ was that soldiers were unemotional machines, and that was the only way they could survive. Private Joker ends the movie much different and colder than he was pre-war. Gone is his joking demeanor, and in its place is a killer of a young woman, begging for mercy. Did he kill her out of mercy? Or was it revenge?

Platoon's message seemed to delve a little deeper than FMJ's. yes, war can dehumanize you so that you become a killing machine to your enemies, but it also has effects that are much more complex. Destroying hundreds of innocents, turning on your friends, these are all things that you become capable of.

After all, if a dead man falls in the jungle, does he make a sound? I think not.