Foil

Character Role Analysis

Barnes, Bunny, Elias, and Taylor

There are foils galore in Platoon. They're literally everywhere. Barnes is the most obvious. While at first Taylor buys what Barnes is selling (he's an experienced soldier, and the one who, Taylor believes, will fix the whole Manny situation), he starts to think a little differently.

For most of the film Barnes is everything Taylor is not: a cold-blooded killer. He kills an innocent woman, he's willing to kill a child, and he kills Elias because he knows Elias plans to file a report about his illegal killing. He even has to nerve to justify his actions by resorting to some faulty logic about the unit as a machine where everybody has to do what they're told. Heck, Barnes even looks way different than Taylor, whose pretty face contrasts markedly with Barnes' heavily scarred appearance.

Bunny is a lot like Barnes, and contrasts notably with Taylor. He's willing to kill innocent people (the one-legged Vietnamese boy), innocent animals (the pig in the village), and, unlike Taylor, is resolutely against smoking marijuana. Unlike Taylor, he actually likes Vietnam. He's not afraid of death, and he sees Vietnam as a playground where one can do whatever one wants. Taylor, in contrast, sees it as a veritable hell.

While Elias ultimately becomes Taylor's mentor, at first he's a potent foil. The young, inexperienced Chris is carrying too much stuff in his pack, a fact that the "lighter" Elias points out. Similarly, Elias' understanding of the war—"We're gonna lose this war" he says at one point—contrasts with Taylor's seeming inability to grasp the full horror of the situation, and where the war effort will ultimately go.