The soldiers are not a chorus behind a white officer's growth, though the film sometimes frames them that way and you should say so. Trip, Shaw, Rawlins, and the drill are the substance: pay refused until it is equal, shoes, the lash, the argument between rage and discipline. The fort at the end is slaughter in the service of a true cause, and the film does not cut to a celebration. A house can bear this if it will not turn it into a highlight.

Watch it once, seriously. The charge afterward is not a speech about how far we have come. It is attention to the men who were asked to prove a humanity that was not the army's to award.