“Blessed by Fire” — its English title deviating slightly from its original Spanish title, “Enchanted by Fire” — is as much a victim of bad timing as it is a casualty of overblown sentimentality. Arriving in theaters only months after Clint Eastwood’s potent one-two punch of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima,” Tristán Bauer’s 2005 film, which opens tonight at the Pioneer Theater, says many of the same things, only in a more unfocused and heavy-handed way. As impressive as some of the film’s sequences may be, many war-film buffs will undoubtedly feel that it’s all been seen and heard before.

That said, “Fire,” which is the first film from Argentina to address the long-hushed agony of the 1982 Falklands War, must be nothing short of a revelation in its homeland. The mere sight of outgunned Argentine soldiers hoofing it across muddy battlefields and a veteran’s emotional, present-day return to a cemetery to visit the remains of his fallen brothers has stirred impassioned debate and discussion in a nation that, until now, has been hesitant to address this slice of history.

But in drawing parallels between this exorcising of a nation’s demons and another recent, Oscar-nominated war epic that did much the same thing — French director Rachid Bouchareb’s brilliant “Days of Glory” — the shortcomings become obvious.

“Days of Glory,” about the injustices that faced colonial African fighters in the French army during World War II, found a way to convert its historical shame into something universal by boiling the travesty down to the personal level. Some of the film’s most powerful moments came not on the battlefield but in quiet asides and discussions; in its most telling and heartbreaking scene, a woman visits a military office hundreds of miles from the front lines and we watch as her letter to a lover is cast aside by French officials who decide they don’t like the foreign name on the envelope.

It’s this sense of breadth, of a larger world existing beyond the battlefields, that’s missing from “Blessed by Fire,” which unfolds as an oversimplified tale of fallen comrades and lives destroyed. Much like Mr. Eastwood’s “Iwo Jima,” “Fire” seeks to show that the horrors of the battlefield do not evaporate into the mist of time; for soldiers, wars are nightmares with no end.

The soldier in question here is Esteban (Gaston Pauls), a journalist who, in later life, is contacted about a man slowly dying in a nearby hospital and who discovers upon arriving that the man fought alongside him in the mud of the Malvinas. The unexpected sight awakens in him a sea of memories that sweep him back to the months-long turmoil he endured while living in a Falklands bunker, waiting for the British forces to arrive, and growing increasingly aware that he and his two best war buddies — Juan (Cesar Albarracin) and Vargas (Pablo Ribba), the man lying in the hospital bed — are outnumbered and outgunned.

Much like the tide, the three men are merely waiting for war to sweep over their poorly protected patch of land and drown everything in its path.

As Mr. Bauer jumps between past and present, between the trenches and the hospital room, we learn more about Esteban’s mates. Vargas got in a fight with his girlfriend just before leaving for the war, and when he used his final phone call to ring her, she hung up on him. Juan has a small son, his pride and joy, and a fact he initially hides from Esteban.

As for Esteban, we learn appallingly little about him — he seems to exist solely as a vehicle to advance the plot — and it’s a glaring omission at the cost of the film’s core that leaves us detached from these trenches and battles. As a result, “Blessed by Fire” is less an involving story than a detached, encyclopedic overview of an event; we see what’s happening to Esteban, but we cannot feel what he’s enduring.

The movie’s most effective moments wander away from the general chaos of the battlefield to offer us a more specific take on the struggles of these individual soldiers. For instance, as the three men endlessly wait for their enemies to arrive, it becomes increasingly obvious that they are under-equipped, malnourished, and under the command of power-hungry and incompetent men who lash out at them sadistically.

In one memorable episode, Esteban, Vargas, and Juan, all starving, leave their platoon to abduct, kill, and cook a sheep grazing nearby. When their plan is discovered, however, the severity of their punishment captures the abject cruelty of their superiors, and the indignities seem to be only the tip of iceberg. Later, we come to recognize the number of soldiers committing suicide, the number trying to infect themselves with hepatitis in hopes of being sent home, and the surreal final orders given to all these men that they must keep word of their defeat secret from their families back home.

For all the movie’s superficial scratching at the surface — all its hesitant hints at the deeper scars lying beneath the cliches — it’s scenes like this one that cut momentarily to a deeper ring of hell, leaving us shocked and awed, and wanting to learn more.

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