Legendary director Sam Fuller's last war film is a vivid and richly detailed masterpiece. Fuller creates powerful imagery that will stick in your mind for a long time after seeing the film. "The Big Red One" is a sprawling and morally resonant a film as you are ever likely to see. Following the Big Red One (the 1st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army) from encounters with Rommel's tanks in Africa, via the D-Day invasion, and ending with the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, this film packs a lot into its narrative, and against all odds, it works. Fuller presents a laundry list of opinions and thematic material in this film, none however, more poignant and important than the theme of the struggles of war. Fuller suggests throughout the course of the film that the true glory that is achieved in war is surviving. It is the survival aspect that keeps the troops going, their dreams for after the war. It is not how many Nazis they kill, or defending freedom, although these too are important motivators, the true grandeur of finishing the war comes in weathering the adversity of the war and coming out alive.
The actual written word, the script for the film, is one of the strongest supporters of the theme that the only true glory of war is surviving. There are very few attempts at sentimentality in this film. Fuller, due to his time spent in WWII, has a seemingly endless fountain of information and wants to express as much of it as he can. Because the audience follows the "four horsemen" and their sergeant through so many endeavors the audience never really grows attached to the actual missions, just the main characters who go through all of the missions. The audience is happy to just see the men make it out of one mission and go on to the next. Subconsciously, the audience has already adopted the mentality that the true glory of war is surviving.