Stone Heads Back to the Jungle

Posted by J.L. Sosa (jorge@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 28, 2007

Oliver Stone is tackling the Vietnam War once again, according to Rope of Silicon.

Pinkville is the director’s forthcoming feature on the My Lai massacre. It will star Bruce Willis and Channing Tatum.

In a sense, Stone is coming full circle. His first Vietnam feature, 1986’s “Platoon,” dealt with a fictional tale of U.S. soldiers going hog-wild on innocent civilians.

Rope of Silicon’s Brad Brevet criticizes Stone for mining familiar territory. Brevet writes, “Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers wish there were actually more wars we could make movies about, or if the Vietnam war was so fucked up that we should just continue to revisit it.”

Well, it’s easy to understand why Stone is obsessed with Vietnam. As a young man, he dropped out of Yale after one year and enlisted in the Army, back in ‘67. He fought in Vietnam, won the Bronze Star for Valor and the Purple Heart.

So, yeah, Stone’s got a right to obsess. He was killing people while Brevet was probably still swimming around in his dad’s balls.

Read more articles by J.L. Sosa