Film Reviews

Letters from Iwo Jima

• Rating:
• Director: Clint Eastwood
• Starring: Kazunari Ninomiya
• Details: US / 142mins (15A).

Letters From Iwo Jima is the sister movie to Flags Of Our Fathers, documenting the horrors on that tiny pacific island. Whereas Flags Of Our Fathers told of the battle and its aftermath from the American point of view, this time around, the Japanese story is front and centre and you'll be happy to hear that it's a better film. The film kicks off 61 years after the battle, as letters home from the bewildered Japanese troops are unearthed from the caves beneath the mountains by archaeologists. The letters give faces and personalities to the soldiers and it's from these that a story, centred mainly on private Saigo (Ninomiya), the charismatic general Kuribayashi (Watanabe) and the lady-killer Baron Nishi (Ihara), is cobbled together. Eastwood waits as long as possible before firing a shot in anger, building the tension to breaking point and creating well-rounded characters in the process. It gives us a different perspective of the Japanese soldier: gone are the one-dimensional honour-mongers we're usually fed as we can see the fear in their eyes as they question their chances for survival. Duty and the love of their country are not foremost in their minds; they just want to get home to their families. The officers are up against it too: commanding a busted up outfit, insubordination is rife and they are constantly lied to by HQ who order them to defend the island to the last man without support from the air or the sea. There is no hope for victory and one officer suggests: "The best thing to do is sink the island to the bottom of the sea." The only downer is that the film is way too long, longer than it needed to be, but Eastwood dots the running time with some magnificent scenes (the suicide pact is the most harrowing) to keep the pace ticking over and the film is more structurally sound that his previous effort. Eastwood isn't interested in giving us just another war film, nor is he telling a story about soldiers at war. What he's interested in is telling the story of people at war, and at that, he's successful.

Review by Gavin Burke