To me, the biggest appeal of this movie is the cinematography - everything is basicallly yellow/brown "dusty", portrayed in a way that gets accross the atmosphere of the desert quite well. Number two is the soundtrack, which is rather original for a movie of this kind.
Not so great are things like story and character development. It's a saying that soldiering is 1% "action" and 99% boredom. This movie seems to be on the track to portray this, setting the stage of an Italian position in a quiter sector of the (at the time) static El Alamein front line. So what could have been done is a story where not much happens, giving time for character development. Instead the story is basically a sequence of increasingly less likely events; the sniper and the truck in the minefield being somewhat believable, the horse and the swim in the sea less so. Through all this the characters basically stay the same; Serra's platoon members are already disillusioned when he arrives and that does not change much. We can assume Serra also loses some of his "I believe we will be in Cairo next week" innocence but we don't really see it happen on screen.
All in all, a nice movie for the experience; just take in the atmosphere and don't pay to much attention to the dialogue.