Platoon and Three Kings
The two movies, ‘Platoon’ and ‘Three Kings’ tell stories about America’s involvement in wars. ‘Platoon’ is about the Vietnam War and the expectations that Americans had as they went into that war. It follows a group of soldiers on the war front and their experiences. The lead character, Chris Taylor enlists for the war with some noble ideals about serving his country. What he experiences during his time in Vietnam changes his perception about the war and life in general. ‘Three Kings’ covers the first Gulf War as it ends. However, a group of soldiers tries to find some gold treasure, and is called into action even though a ceasefire has already been declared. Both movies try to give alternative perspectives to the respective wars, and in some way, expose certain truths that the public never gets to know.
Oliver Stone, a Vietnam War veteran, whose work is known to contain violence, directed ‘Platoon’. However, in this movie, he weaves a deeper story beneath the violence. He uses his experiences to give the movie authenticity. In the movie, a young man called Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) leaves college to enlist for the war out of idealism. He is proud about serving his country and believes the war is for a good course. When he first arrives at the airport in Saigon, he gets a dose of reality of the war when he sees a cart full of body bags of dead soldiers. From there, things only get worse. The soldiers in Taylor’s platoon deal with the stress of war by indulging in alcohol and dope. There are soldiers loyal to Sgt. Barnes who will do anything to survive. They use a lot of violence to achieve their ends. A second group of soldiers is loyal to Sgt. Elias. They try to survive with some semblance of humanity. There is some sort of civil war within the same platoon. Taylor is new in the platoon, and both sergeants are always trying to win him over. He has a lot to absorb and provides a middle ground between the two factions in the platoon.
‘Three Kings’ is set at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Three American soldiers come across a map that shows the location of a bunker with gold inside. The gold bullion was stolen from Kuwait by Saddam’s soldiers (Russell, 1999). The three soldiers are Sergeant Troy Barlow, Chief (Ice Cube) and Conrad Vig. They are joined by Special Forces Officer Archie Gates (George Clooney), who promises to lead them to recover the gold without getting authorization from senior officers. When they reach the bunker, they find Iraqi soldiers butchering and torturing Iraqi citizens that had risen against Saddam. The four American soldiers decide to help the Iraqi rebels escape to freedom. In doing this, they have to violate a ceasefire that has been declared (Langford, 2005). Their situation is compounded by the fact that they went to get the gold for themselves without getting permission from their seniors.
The movie ‘Platoon’ manages to portray an atmosphere of imminent danger as it follows the daily lives of the soldiers. The audience is made to feel what the soldiers are going through; the heat, rain, bugs, snakebites and so on. The soldiers are sleepless, and whenever they sleep, there is the danger of an ambush. After an ambush, the soldiers go through the traumatic routine of taking a roll call to determine who amongst them survived and how many died. The footage has some realistic scenes that enable the audience to experience the fear and confusion of soldiers in the war. The characters in the movie are symbolic in different ways. The most obvious is the intense rivalry between Elias and Barnes, who represent good and evil respectively. Of course, neither man is a complete saint or devil, but they represent two opposite poles around which the other soldiers coalesce.
The movie ‘Three Kings’ may be a satirical presentation, but it tackles serious issues in the American society today. The ghost of colonialism continues to appear in U.S. political actions. The administration believes it is America’s moral obligation to intervene in other nation’s governments and policies. The U.S. sees the Arab nations as representing evil while America stands for good. The prescription, as America sees it, is intervention in the form of war or aid. The movie tries to move away from the mainstream views of Arabs but retains the theme of colonialism. The war is about America’s intervention in Iraq. The movie tries to limit its critique of military campaign by U.S. in the first Gulf War by only referring to it sparsely in neocolonial terms. The four U.S. soldiers in the movie are after gold when they come across the Iraqi civilians that need their help. They change the focus of their mission to help the Iraqi civilians. They rescue the prisoners and accompany them across the Iranian border while being pursued by Iraqi soldiers. In performing the rescue, the soldiers have to give up the gold to their superiors. The movie tries to clean the image of American soldiers intervening in foreign lands (Christensen, Haas, & Christensen, 2005). The Iraqis saw America as a colonialist invader, so it is with an ironic twist that American soldiers abandon their greedy sojourn to rescue Iraqi civilians from Iraqi soldiers who imprisoned, tortured and killed many of them.
The story of ‘platoon’ is told through the view of Chris Taylor, a young private. The moment he arrives in Vietnam, he immediately hates it. The conditions are extremely bad, and he likens the place to hell. From the movie storyline, we learn that Taylor comes from a middle-class family. He left college to join the war because he believed it was a good cause. He gives an honest perspective of the realities of war. He comes from a privileged background with a good educational foundation. He tells how the soldiers he is fighting along are not as privileged as him. Most of them are poor, they come from small towns, and they barely have a high school education (Stone, 1986). Most of them do not have much of a future, yet they are the ones at the battlefront fighting to preserve the freedom of Americans back home.
Taylor ends up aligning himself with Elias, who is rational and humane. Within the platoon, there is an ongoing struggle of ideologies. The perils of the war cause a lot of tension and fear amongst the members of the platoon. The pressures of the war take their toll on the soldiers, and survival by any means becomes their priority. During the movie, the platoon discovers the corpse of one member of the platoon tied to a tree with his throat cut. Emotions run high, but when they go the nearby village to investigate, the villagers are uncooperative. The soldiers find food and weapons that were meant for enemy soldiers. In their rage, some American soldiers try to rape a village woman, but Taylor manages to stop them. It is a struggle to maintain humanity in the face of all the danger that the American soldiers faced in this harsh territory. Sergeant Barnes loses his cool and shoots dead an old woman who has been making irritating noise. Sergeant Elias witnesses the murder and takes steps to stop any further violence on the villagers. However, the intense rivalry and hostility between the two sergeants reaches boiling point. The highly moral Elias is determined to pursue this murder later and bring formal charges against Barnes. Barnes knows this and is equally determined to prevent that from happening. Later, Taylor points out that a civil war has broken out in the platoon and the Americans are now fighting each other rather than common enemy (Stone, 1986).
‘Three Kings’ came across as rather unconventional going by Hollywood expectations. The cast is full of action movie stars, and viewers expect an action-packed movie with plenty of violence. Using dark humor, the movie manages to subvert its genre while maintaining an anarchic attitude and barbed political commentary. The movie exposes America’s foreign policy as deficient in consistency of principles. The protagonists come to the realization that America has failed to destroy Saddam’s regime and save Iraq as it set out to do. It has failed in its broad mission of saving the good Arabs and eliminating the bad ones. However, the small group of American soldiers that were on a treasure hunt are able to claim some moral victory since they managed to save a small group of Iraqi civilians. The movie manages to make viewers laugh at oddities of war. There are disturbing scenes showing the horrors of war, followed by humorous scenes that remind the audience that the soldiers are just normal human beings.
The two movies approach the theme of war in different ways. Oliver Stone was using ‘Platoon’ to tell his story when he fought in the war in Vietnam (Eberwein, 2007). He tries to give the viewers a glimpse of the turmoil that American soldiers went through in the war. The movie does not dwell much on the politics of war, trying to justify or criticize it. Instead, viewers get to see the real effects of war on soldiers on the battlefront. Instead of portraying good Americans versus the bad enemy, the movie pursues the ‘real war’ within the American platoon. They are together fighting a common enemy, but they also have ideological and moral differences on how to go about it. It invokes American audiences to introspectively look at themselves rather than assume a high moral ground when approaching any war. We see American soldiers capable of killing and harassing innocent civilians just like the enemies are usually accused of doing.
As for ‘Three Kings’, it was made at a time there was growing resentment about U.S. interventionism, especially in the Arab world. The Arabs see the U.S. as an arrogant, colonial master that invades other countries in pursuit of its selfish interests (Lehrack, 2005). The movie cleverly ignores the typical issues associated with the war and follows the adventures of four American soldiers driven by personal greed. They are forced to shelve their plans and risk their lives to rescue a group of Iraqi civilians from the terror of Iraqi soldiers. America entered the war on the rhetoric that it was going to save innocent Arabs from the oppression of dictator Saddam, and that is what the four American soldiers end up doing. Critics of America have always pointed out that its war agenda is driven by greed (Brody, 2010). America, on the other hand, claims that it sets out to liberate the oppressed and spread freedom all over the world. The movie weaves these two divergent views in a satirical manner without ignoring the seriousness of the situation.
Between the two movies, ‘Platoon’ emerges better in its portrayal of the pitfalls associated with war. Apart from the gunfights and explosions on the frontline, there are usually other ideologies fighting behind the scenes. It gives a vivid picture of what American soldiers go through whenever they are sent to war. It makes the public question the necessity of these wars and the price America has to pay for them. Is the administration being fair when they send young, poor Americans to the frontline to be killed and maimed in pursuit of imperialistic agendas? The story is told through the eyes of a soldier at the heart of it all, and the American public is given a perspective that will weigh heavily on their conscience every time the administration decides to send soldiers to far off places for war.
References
Brody, D. (2010). Visualizing American empire: Orientalism and imperialism in the Philippines. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Christensen, T., Haas, P. J., & Christensen, T. (2005). Projecting politics: Political messages in American film. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe.
Eberwein, R. T. (2007). Armed forces: Masculinity and sexuality in the American war film. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.
Langford, B. (2005). Film genre: Hollywood and beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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Lehrack, O. J. (2005). America’s battalion: Marines in the first Gulf war. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.
Russell, D. O. (1999). Three Kings. United States of America: Village Roadshow/
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Stone, O. (1986). Platoon. United States of America: Hemdale
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