If you are doing a movie about war, during a time when war is pending (or hanging about/over your head), you can expect it to try to bring people together. To give a sense of nationality so to speak. But this also is a movie that is artistically done and has a story that it wants to tell you above all.
I had the pleasure of watching this at the Festival in Berlin and we had a long introduction. And most of it was focused (no pun intended) on the lighting of the movie. When you have a black and white picture this is extremely crucial and the filmmakers did know that. Framing wise you cannot fault it and there are some fine performances within this movie. There are better war movies indeed, but this did not only copy (it's lighting style), but gave others reasons to copy from it after it was released