Such a micro-cosm of America today!
The more I've thought about this film the more I see it as a microcosm of America today, which has been handed/ plays the role of the Tribe of Judah on the world stage.
As disparity grows, the boxing character largely mirrors the experience of the black man or an immigrant man and their chances to succeed in a land that worships competition and violence all the more similarly as the Nazis raised up their own brand of Fascism largely through the ever expanding public outraged reaction and growing cartoons over certain strategically excluded peoples in relationship to the more pressured desperate whole. "The Apprentice" and the Trump campaign come to mind at this point.
Discriminated and thrown in the street on the one hand - and with the force of "reality" programming the non conforming list grows with the desperation of a meaner middle class, those other than gays or pacifists can still gain a small level of acceptance and success by being forced to fight- not for the amusement of camp guards but for the needs of those oil-moneyed interests who forge their own shackles otherwise, and try to have some faith or vision that this is not the case.
The real soldiers here today are more the ones who won't be soldiers, and who stand up for freedom every day in a land more mired in less truthful media image, as the German teacher of "All Quiet on the Western Front" grows ever louder and more vocal with his married transvestite guard in yappy close proximity, ever twittering BEHIND the War King-
Witch is the one truly offensive cliché I don't like about this film, because rest assured the gays of the military academies are never about anything but being the most manly of monsters, and yet Hollywood has a long history of trying to tie transvestism and cross dressing to the Nazis, when in fact the opposite is more true, and The Nazis were as rabid towards gays as they were the jews. It wood be a rare bird indeed who'd join them when the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank. And when the Buttercup club of the Three Amigos has become an elitist institution somehow.