Movies we've watched so far

After our current class discussions and going over the scenes from the movies, it has become easier to analyze them. Before this class, I would have called all these films similar to each other based on the fact that they are all about Vietnam. Watching Apocalypse Now by myself, I realized from the first scene that I was able to pick out different things that the director put in there to get an idea across. Because of this, I can say that these three movies are totally different in what they are trying to say and how they are trying to say it. After watching Coppola's surreal style, it occured to me that not only are these films different, they're extremely different. Im curious to find out if any of them affected or inspired one another. I know that Apocalypse Now was done first in 1979 but the other two were done a year apart from each other in '85 and '86. Perhaps Kubrick was inspired by Platoon to go in a totally different direction from it.