The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

40. 1986 - Platoon

Platoon Willem Dafoe Charlie Sheen
Orion Pictures

Honourable Mentions: Aliens, Blue Velvet, Ferris Bueller's Day Off

When it comes to the cinema of the Vietnam War, there is a "before" and "after" Oliver Stone's Platoon.

As the narrative goes, before, there was propaganda like John Wayne's The Green Berets and exaggerated depictions like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter; after, there was Hamburger Hill, Dead Presidents, and Casualties of War.

A generalisation, of course, given the overall direction of travel with the genre at the time and the fact that Hamburger Hill - another raw and committed depiction of the conflict - premiered mere months after Platoon, but that shouldn't disabuse anyone of the fact that Stone's film is a unique beast of its own, a trailblazing text from a Vietnam veteran that made tangible a generation's sense of betrayal and innocence lost, as well as the director's own wartime experiences.

Platoon's iconicity has led to repeated parody over the years, but that hasn't dulled its edge. The feud between Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger's Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes, the use of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings - Stone's film remains one of the eighties' most essential.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.