- Angst? What Angst?: Most of the kids turn out surprisingly okay at the end for all they've been through. Likewise, Turner takes the total slaughter of his team at the beginning pretty well. And Bianca seems to get over her Attempted Rape rather quickly. The actual rape later is a different matter.
- Complete Monster: Major Taussig is a cold, cruel man who is firmly distinct from the other reasonable German Soldiers. A member of the SS who has no compunction in committing war crimes, Taussig spends the film trying to murder or torture any "Partisans" he comes across in the Italian countryside. At the film's opening, Taussig shows off his methods by gathering every man, woman and child in the village, lining them up and having them all gunned down without batting an eye before taking the village as a base for his men.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: If the movie has a fault (its rape scenes and leaning on the unrealistic side when it comes to the battle scenes aside), is that it can't quite seem to settle on a tone or moral the audience should take from it. We have (essentially) untrained kids mowing down countless Nazis left and right, and it can't quite seem to decide if it wants to show war as a fun adventure or as a grim reality with tragic psychological tolls that come with children becoming killers, and its efforts to have it both ways leave it feeling a bit disjointed.
- Lost in Medias Res: One of the film's problems.
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