It's a precise (almost clinical) riff on Dead Poets Society and others like it, but lacks the same level of heart until the end when it's too late to be invested. It works anyway because Ridley Scott makes anything watchable and the tropes are pretty foolproof.
It sucks that we could have a much more insightful version of this today with a sharper sense of class and more nuanced sense of masculinity - but that version would also be color graded, composited, and CGI'd out the wazoo until there was nothing tactile left to look at.
