The story is not interesting enough for this to be a cinema movie, that's why it went straight to tv. I hate watching a movie which makes me impatient when it's going to end. The interesting moments are too few to make if worth a watch. One notion worth mentioning though is the idea of sacrifice, that one high-ranking officer knowingly sacrificed an unusual number of soldiers for the 'greater' good. It's not clear what the standpoint of the movie is, but I suspect the writer leaned more towards the brutality being worth it.
[sidenote] It would be interesting to know why attaching knives on rifles stopped becoming fashionable.