10 War Movie Moments You'll Never Forget
3. Reaching For The Heavens - Platoon
Oliver Stone's Platoon is one of the most authentic and lived-in portrayals of the Vietnam War, and one that could have only come from a man who had served in it. Stone, whose most iconic works have reckoned with the concept of lost American innocence in the 1960s, enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces to serve in Vietnam and returned disillusioned and angry - an anger he wielded with righteous fury in films like JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Platoon.
Movies about the Vietnam War had been made before Platoon, but most had approached the conflict through a mollifying lens, ranging from pulp adventure (1970's The Losers) to blatant propaganda (1968's The Green Berets). Platoon was its own kind of beast - an almost documentarian account of life as a GI in Vietnam that was mostly concerned with the brutal every day of the conflict.
Drawing from his own experiences as a soldier, Stone yields one of the most powerful anti-war films ever in Platoon. It is perhaps ironic, then, that in its attempts to demystify Vietnam, the film also produced one of the most operatic examples in the war movie genre - a sequence that, while heartbreaking in context, has been codified into popular culture through parody: the death of Willem Dafoe's Sgt. Elias.
Betrayed by Tom Berenger's Barnes and harried by pursuing NVA soldiers, Elias emerges from the jungle canopy and is shot multiple times, throwing his hands up to the heavens before dying, all while Adagio for Strings swells. Even with the years of parody it's faced, it's still a brilliant scene - a crushing moment, made evermore devastating for the fact it feels like Elias is pleading with the heavens for an answer he'll never hear. "Why?"