20 Greatest Opening Movie Scenes Of All Time
14. Platoon
Up until the release of Oliver Stone's Platoon, the Vietnam War had suffered from a dearth of cinematic coverage from US studios. Or at least not authentically.
1968's The Green Berets starring John Wayne was essentially just government funded propaganda, and while Michael Cemino's The Deer Hunter marked a watershed moment in this regard, illustrating the destabilising effect the draft had on American families and veterans, Platoon aimed to lay bare the experiences every GI had during the conflict.
Stone, a veteran of the war himself, wasted no time at all in painting a chaotic picture of America's ill-fated excursion to Vietnam. The opening scene, featuring a young Charlie Sheen disembarking from a transport plane to the tune of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, is bone-chilling.
The young enlistee is greeted by bodybags, thousand-yard stares, and then the heat and swelter of the Vietnamese jungle. It makes for a horrifying opening, and while the film does, of course, escalate the carnage of the war with each passing act, the image of Private Chris Taylor arriving to Barber's swelling orchestral score will go down as one of the war genre's most authentic.