This movie describes a truly horrific event, to be sure. But it all falls down from poor performances from all the cast. It is impossible to feel the emotion of almost any character, as all the emotional scenes seem like parodies of themselves. For example, a character is shot at the start of the movie, and you get the clichéd desperate, "Am I gonna make it, Sergeant?", "Yeah it ain't nothing'", but it plays out like a sketch from a Wayans Brothers movie (I don't know if they've made the War Movie yet) or something starring Leslie Nielsen.
The sergeant played by Sean Penn reminds me of Al Bundy from Married With Children, while Fox is the greatest self-deprecating good-guy cliché you can imagine... Thank God he curses and smokes during it.
His emotional "NOOOO!!!" is definitely more suited to comedies like Back To The Future than so-called serious movies such as this.
To their credit, some of the "main" scenes... (without giving too much away, where they actually perform some fairly horrific acts) ...are well done and do make us take the subject matter seriously. But that is in spite of, not thanks to the acting.