Could have been much better...

I thought that there were some interesting echoes of films like 'The Long and the Short and the Tall', 'Thin Red Line' and 'Apocalypse Now'. Backstory would have slowed things down, bearing in mind that there were a couple of lapses into sentimentality to get over.

Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.

IMO it was a mistake to call this film "Kokoda" as that leads to an expectation that isn't met by the final product. The film we get is a very intimate, authentic and consequentially "claustrophobic" experience and not meant to be ABOUT anything more than we are shown. Rather than tell a panoramic and epic story of Australian heros fighting to save their country it instead gives us an "in their boots" EXPERIENCE of soldiers in that campaign - where the whole thing was an ordeal of survival against both the environment and an enemy that were more like terrible phantoms than real men - and within which the participants had no bigger picture of what was happening than their immediate imperatives. A title something like simply "the track" might have fitted better and resulted in less disappointment.