Letters from Iwo Jima (USA) (Warner Bros/Dreamworks/Paramount) (2006) ***1/2Year: 2006iMDB
Director: Clint Eastwood Cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
Letters from Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood's companion to Flags of our Fathers. Filmed back to back, both movies tell, in essence, the story of the battle for the island of Iwo Jima towards the end of World War II.
The movies are however, not mirroring each other. If Flags of our Fathers focused more on the political efforts to raise money for the war and on the lives of some of the war heroes after their return from battle, Letters from Iwo Jima is a war movie in the purest sense. A solid war movie, by all means, but one that would not have gotten a similar attention if it wasn't directed by an American director, and one of Eastwood's stature at that.
Eastwood dares to show the world (and perhaps American in particular) that the enemy is not just a bunch of mindless lunatics that are out for blood. The enemy soldiers are just as tri-dimensional as the American ones are, with families and children waiting at home, with dreams and hopes, with convictions - some with their own, others with what they have been indoctrinated.
Letters from Iwo Jima is a good war movie. But its importance transcends the movie qualities. It is like Ender's Speaker for the Dead - as Eastwood takes the time to understand the enemy that the Americans fought and destroyed and tell back to the world the story through the enemy's eyes.
Posted by TheCasualCritic on January 31, 2007 12:21 AM | TrackBack