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REVIEW: Chasing the Light — Oliver Stone’s Intimate Autobiography
Coming of age in Ronald Reagan’s neon-tinted 1980s, complete with big hair and big military spending, the Vietnam War was still a fresh wound on the psyche of America.
It was in this pre-Desert Storm environment that I was subjected to the over-the-top action movies of the 1980s like Commando, Top Gun and Rambo, which portrayed the U.S. military machine as an unstoppable force in an attempt to regain lost face in the aftermath of Vietnam.
And while some directors were focusing on the post-war veteran experience, like Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, or simply using the Vietnam War as a setting for a larger story, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there were very few directors willing to take an audience back to the authenticity and intimacy of the grunt soldier’s experience on the ground in Vietnam.
Oliver Stone’s 1986, semi-autobiographical, Oscar-winning movie Platoon did just that.
Platoon was my introduction to Stone’s work, and I used to listen to the soundtrack on cassette over and over, until the magnetic tape eventually disintegrated. Why the music of my father’s generation was vastly superior to my own is a topic for another time, but Stone took the audience in a completely different direction than was popular at the time, and it has had…
