One of the great anti-war movies. It focuses on a group of new recruits, soldiers who have had very little taste of war. They relieve the exhausted Marines who have been fighting the Japanese at Guadalcanal. As they engage with a fierce and determined enemy, the idealism, the patriotism, the abstractions that buoy them at first fade away. The world shrinks to the immediate, the individual enemy, the need to survive and the need to help one's buddies survive. In the end, the only meaning is in that survival. The abstractions that politicians use to justify war disappear. All that remains is the life-and-death struggle, for one's own life and for the lives of one's companions.