Its dramatic choices — including the contested practice of Marines killing their Code Talker charges rather than allowing capture — presented the bodyguard-kill-order scenario in ways that went beyond what the historical record supports as a systematic policy.

And its focus on action and violence necessarily compressed and distorted the aspects of the Code Talker experience that were most historically significant: the development of the code, the specific communications work, the postwar silence.

Several surviving Code Talkers expressed mixed feelings about the film in interviews given around the time of its release.

They acknowledged that any major Hollywood film about the Code Talker story would reach audiences that no documentary or written account could, and that the broader attention was valuable.

They also noted, with varying degrees of directness, that the film was not their story — that what had been translated into a Hollywood action film was something that had been much more specific, much more technically demanding, and much more deeply connected to Diné identity than any film built around a white protagonist could fully convey.

This discomfort points to a recurring challenge in how the Code Talker story has been received and retold.