... because of his madness and the gunning down of a VC granny.
But in Full Metal Jacket everyone doesn't seem to mind "Animal Mother" gunning down random folks in a rice field for no reason other than insanity.
He was a badass mofo. BUT he was also a villian. Once he starts talking about the "Machine" and how if it breaks down, everything goes bad. Talk like that is of a puppet, whereas Elias was badass soldier but still grounded.
SARAH PALIN. Hero of the stupid.
Barnes was not entirely a cold, soulless villain. Remember after two men are blown up by a booby trap, he's sitting alone with a sad look on his face smoking and Taylor sees him.
share[deleted]
ah, cause he's a dick. Were you paying attention?
Cult Leader my mind's frightening, I drink blood from a human skull like a Viking
"....because of his madness and the gunning down of a VC granny."
Well there's that, and there's also the time where Sgt Barnes put a gun to the little Vietnamese girls head, and threatened to blow her brains out in front her father if he didn't confess to providing assistance to the enemy, that he may, or may not have had any control over. And, then there was that time when he murdered in cold blood Sgt Elias. Then there was the time were Sgt Barnes nearly murders Chris at the end of the film.
I have heard arguments on this thread that Sgt Barnes was justified in all these actions, and we should be more understanding of Sgt Barns because War made him who he is, and "HIS JOB IS NOT TO BE NICE, ITS TO MAKE SURE YOU DO WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO."
Let me take this moment to remind people on this board that there is such a thing as "Moral and Ethics in War", and, "crimes against humanity", and the murder of women and children civilians, or the murder of fellow soldiers are considered "Unethical" and a crime against humanity, even when in the middle of a war. Really, you can look it up for yourselves.
Has anyone heard of the Mai Lai Massacre? That's a very real "unethical" example of were American soldiers murdered, slaughtered and raped over a three hundred Vietnamese woman and children. While there were some soldiers who refused Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barkerto orders to take part in the massacre despite being threatened with court marshal for refusing a direct order, but most of the soldiers involved in the Mai Lai Massacre just "DID WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO", and just, "followed orders".
However, that argument didn't work for the SS officers during their criminal trials at Nuremberg when being prosecuted for crimes against humanity, because they have a duty to refuse any command that is a crime against humanity.
So, while I was disturbed by Chris executing Sgt Barnes without a chance to plead his case, even though at that point one could argue that it was self-defense because Barns just tried to murder Chris a few hours ago, but was saved by a miracle. I can certainly understand why Chris did kill Barns after witnessing all the crimes that Barns committed during his tour under Barnes, and that Chris realized that Barnes would never face a trial for his crimes.
If you have been in combat you can understand how dehumanizing war is. Especially the nature of the war in Vietnam. You have to look at the civilians as the enemy because the Viet Cong were everywhere and nowhere. The tension, paranoia, frustration, all come boiling out and this is where military atrocities come from. So while I certainly dont condone what Barnes did, I can understand where it came from.
Haters gonna hate
I remember when you all first watched Platoon. You told me how much you ADMIRED THE BASTARD.
shareI was wrong.
SpiltPersonality
Wrong? You ain't never been right! Barnes has been shot five times. Five times! Does that mean something to you? Barnes ain't meant to die. The only thing that can kill Barnes is Barnes.
Well, okay, I guess maybe you can, too, at the end of a battle.
I fart in your general direction
Wrong? You ain't never been right! Barnes has been shot five times. Five times! Does that mean something to you? Barnes ain't meant to die. The only thing that can kill Barnes is Barnes.
Did he say, Hot heads or Hop Heads?
Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?
I was wrongahh a satisfying turn-around for the impetuousness of youth share
I think it had to do with him being a murderous sociopathic monster
shareLike I said with all the hate for Barnes, I couldn't call him superficial, but definitely mean and rude. That scene when he sat down with the sad look on his face after two men were blown up by a booby trap and the quiver in his voice after confronting the men from Gardner being killed showed he at least had a human side, somewhat.
shareI think that it's because people take the movie (and the character) too literally and don't stop to look at the obvious metaphors present. The Taylor character (Charlie Sheen) is really nothing more than a literary device who is supposed to give people who were unfamiliar with the war or who didn't understand it a lens to view it through. Elias is supposed to represent the generation that stayed home even though he's present in the war as a three-tour soldier (a liberty that Stone probably took to get that element into the movie). Barnes is supposed to represent the generation that went to war.
I think that Barnes was meant to be viewed as the most sympathetic character in the movie because he's the one character who was completely ruined by the war. That's why he became evil. He was basically already dead.
In the final battle when he almost kills Taylor I don't think he was trying to murder him, I just think that he went berserk and thought that Taylor was an NVA soldier. This is metaphorical too, because there is a close-up of Berenger's eyes in this scene and I think that that close-up is supposed to represent the ruined humanity of the war.
And when Taylor kills him at the end I thought that it was a mercy killing as much as revenge for Elias or anything else. Oliver Stone filmed an alternate ending in which he didn't kill Barnes and allowed him to survive and (presumably) be sent home. I think that that would have been a worse ending for the character. I mean, what would have happened to him when he went back home?
People hate Barnes because they see him as the villain of the movie (which he really isn't) and they don't think when they watch the movie.
@dnlbkr9
Maybe you also should take the the theme of revenge into the equation. Barnes was destroyed by war, his face was destroyed by the enemy (and one cannot exclude the possibility of massive nerve or even brain damage). Now he is chasing VC like Melville's Ahab was chasing the White Whale (or do you think the name was used accidentally in the voiceover?)
I don't agree completely with how you see Barnes and Elias as representations of people who went to the war and those who didn't. To me they represents two ideas of how to conduct a war. While Elias tries to keep it honourable and human, and plays by rules (while the enemy don't), Barnes is more like the guys who decided that dropping a bomb on Hiroshima will save more lives than it destroys. He is a less philosophical version of Kurtz. I had the impression that Barnes was the only character in the movie who actually was interested in winning the war - by any means...
He thinks that the inhuman situation requires inhuman methods. Do I share this POV? I never been in this kind of situation so I cannot say. But - at least partially - I can understand his way of thinking. For over 20 years I wander why so few people included film critics cannot see that. Maybe it is a flaw of Stone's filmmaking as I know he had quite a lot sympathy for Barnes and admired the soldier he based him upon.
When Chris shoots him it is another act of revenge from his PoV, but as you wrote, for Barnes it is an act of mercy.
Chris became like Barnes, and "only Barnes can kill Barnes".
Seeing if from different viewpoints is a good point, because I think that Taylor had different motivations when he killed Barnes. Part of it probably was revenge for Elias, but I think that part of the reason he went through with it was out of mercy for Barnes, too. They make a brief reference to this in the ending VO when Taylor mentions that he was "a son born of two fathers (Barnes and Elias)."
A lot of people talk about the religious symbology and mythology in the movie, particularly comparing Elias to Christ, which is made pretty obvious I have to admit. But Stone (and a large number of Vietnamese) are Buddhist, and I think that there's a lot of Buddhist mythology in the movie, particularly the idea of cause and effect and yin and yang.
There's a deleted scene in the movie where Rhah talks about love and hate as pertaining to Barnes and Elias, which is really a sanitized way of saying good versus evil. This scene was cut because Stone felt that Depp (in a relatively small role) stole it from Sheen, Quinn, and Keith David, who all had bigger parts. It would have clearly painted Barnes as hate or evil, which would have made the movie a whole lot less ambiguous, and cutting the scene may have actually strengthened the overall product in the opinions of many critics who just seem to love moral ambiguity because it gives them something to write about in either a positive or negative way.
I also suspect that Dale Dye may have had a lot to do with cutting the scene as he seemed to sympathize with the character a lot. This is very evident in the novelization of the screenplay by Dye in which he offers direct insight into Barnes' thoughts and motivations. Maybe even Claire Simpson and Arnold Kopelson suggested the ambiguity to Stone. Or as you said, Stone sympathized with the character because of who he was based on, and maybe he didn't want to bottom-line identify him as evil in the final product because he felt guilty about using the real person to create an exaggerated (I hope) character.
"Only Barnes can kill Barnes," so when Taylor kills him he has essentially become Barnes, and therefore must be seeing it from the Barnes POV (a mercy killing). Revenge also works partly in this scenario, though, because it would be an example of cause and effect (Barnes killed Elias, Taylor killed Barnes). This is Taylor's yin and yang combining for the kill, essentially, as both his Elias-half (good) and his Barnes-half (evil) are killing Barnes.
And yes, there is a direct comparison between Barnes and Ahab in VO dialogue. He's out for revenge against the people who scarred him, as Ahab was out for revenge against the whale that took his leg. Ahab really doesn't want to be a whaler anymore, but he needs the Pequod and its crew and the pretense of whaling to find Moby Dick. Barnes needs the war and the Army and the platoon in order to exact his revenge against the VC/NVA. From that standpoint, I don't really think he was interested in winning the war. In fact, I think that he would have wanted the war to go on forever, if anything.
I also don't think that Barnes would have made any comparison between his situation and Hiroshima, or any other similar act in war. To him it was a lot more simple: He wanted to kill VC and NVA troops.
I don't like to compare Platoon and Apocalypse Now, so I won't discuss the comparison to Kurtz.
''I think very few people are good enough to remain decent in every circumstance. Both history and various studies on human behavior to point to that the majority of people are capable of doing awful things at least occasionally in certain circumstances.
I think that Barnes USED to be a good man and still had a bit left in him, but the mixture of killing, watching people get killed, being in constant danger, and the responsibility placed on him had begun to eat at his morality. He became hardened and started to view the world as nothing more than a nihilistic killing field where the only hope of survival to kill and follow orders.
I don't think he is necessarily evil in the conventional sense of the word. He is just a man who has (if you will pardon the Star Wars reference) "turned to the Dark Side". He has allowed the majority of his empathy and mercy to stripped away and is running on his darkest instincts.''
THAT was PERFECT....
Religion is a mental disease.....and waterboarding is one hell of a Sport!!!
Barnes is not a bad person. He believed that what they were doing was righteous and in defense of the United States and freedom. After being wounded, scarred for life, recovering in a hospital for a year, and then volunteering to go back because he still believed in what he was doing, only to find out that the people calling the shots in the war were, as he put it "fighting this war with one hand tied around their balls" he probably felt betrayed.
You see he still cares when Sandy picks up the box of maps for S2 and is blown up. He is torn up. He laces into them when Taylor gets wounded in their first ambush for messing up in the bush.
Barnes still cares about the men, and the way he sees it as the best way to protect them, is to drive them to be hard, to be merciless with the enemy, or those helping the enemy.
He is not going to be a victim due to politics or incompetence. That is how I see it.