Yes, we’ve seen this kind of breathless, unyielding battle action before, most famously in Saving Private Ryan, but it’s been a long time since a war movie made combat feel this immediate and brutally physical. It’s easy to forget how many lives could be lost before soldiers even reached the beach, cut down in the water as they fought through waves, gear and incoming fire. The Tarawa landing here refuses to let you forget it. Berg knows how to stage enormous sequences without losing the people inside them, so even when smoke, sand and explosions swallow the frame, you can still follow what’s happening.

Jacques Jouffret’s cinematography gives the film enormous scale while keeping us right beside the actors. He and Berg shoot handheld with very wide lenses pushed close to the men, letting faces fill the foreground while ships, beaches and explosions stretch behind them. Battlefields were physically built in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia, with practical explosions and even a tank firing an actual flamethrower. You can feel every bit of that heat.

Berg and editors Jon Otazua and Garret Donnelly also weave archival footage through the film, cutting between recreated battles and actual images of college football games, troops waiting to ship out and hollow-eyed survivors staring back at the camera. It’s an effective reminder that the men we’re watching aren’t simply characters being moved through a war movie. People really lived this. Bob Hope’s legendary USO tour even gets folded into the mix, appearing in both archival footage and recreated scenes with Blake Erickson playing Hope. Every so often, after an especially punishing sequence, Berg cuts to Earth seen from space, still spinning along no matter what is happening below. It’s a simple image, but what it represents lands. The planet keeps turning while men kill one another over tiny pieces of it.

Liz McGregor’s costumes also help chart what the war is doing to these men. Uniforms that begin pressed and orderly gradually become sweat-soaked, salt-stained and torn. Explosions in the Sky, whose partnership with Berg goes back more than two decades to Friday Night Lights, provide a score that knows exactly when to swell and when to let the images do the hurting.

Some beats will be familiar to anyone raised on war movies: boot-camp hazing, letters from home, rivalries forged into brotherhood. Berg seems to know it, too. Even the Parris Island material moves by almost like a compressed checklist, giving us enough of the genre rituals without pretending we haven’t seen them before. What matters more is that Berg and co-screenwriter Mark L. Smith (Twisters) give these men personalities beyond athleticism and battlefield heroics.