Being a grand Clint Eastwood fan, I attended “Flags of our Fathers” earlier this year expecting a monumental experience. Nothing could have surprised me more, however, with how disconnected I felt from that recount. It was a exciting tale and a nice tribute, but its awkward chronicle framing and (more importantly) lack of suitable character development disappointed me. All I felt left with was a heavy-handed message with no true dramatic weight. I mild looked forward to “Letters From Iwo Jima,” however, intrigued by Eastwood’s ambitions of portraying a Japanese perspective centered on the same event. Such a valorous fade makes me respect Eastwood even more. The film was rushed into release for the 2006 awards season when “Flags” failed to become a significant front-runner, and that decision seems to have paid off for the studio. Recognized by several major critic’s groups, “Letters” also stands as a Best Portray candidate at the Academy awards.
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Ironically, the aspect that left me unmoved with “Flags” is the strongest asset of “Letters”–and that is character development. Spending time with a handful of major characters, the film does a nice job fleshing them out in a genuine three-dimensional contrivance. The film intimately examines their position on Iwo Jima, the hopelessness, the strategizing. The interactions between the soldiers is well developed and well-behaved, and the incorporation of writing letters as a legend design provides even more insight. We fetch to “hear” their thoughts and to study their backstory. The moments that we step away from Iwo Jima in flashbacks are well integrated and provide a greater emotional context for their modern location.
As for residence, the film explores the American invasion of Iwo Jima. Arrive the destroy of the war, the Japanese soldiers left to bear this stronghold have become increasingly isolated and unsupported from the mainland. With a unusual, somewhat controversial, General in command–it snappy becomes definite that this is a mission of holding on until death. American victory seems assured–so with honor, dignity and sacrifice, all the remaining soldiers are being asked to die in the name of duty. Building a complex system of bunkers within the mountain, they are (in essence) constructing their have graves. When the invasion actually begins, the battle scenes are harrowing and believable–and the awesome underground cavern system is a claustrophobic and memorable region allotment.
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One of the main accepted criticisms of “Letters” comes from a perceived revisionist arrive. By viewing the film’s characters as protagonists with humanity, is it glossing over the atrocities committed in a wartime residence? And obviously, a legitimate movie could have been made to depict this too–but this isn’t that movie. This is a film that examines a few individuals struggling with a just code which is at odds with a desire to live. Not every Japanese soldier was a monster, nor was every German or Italian–but neither is every American soldier a saint. What the film has endeavored to shriek is that, most importantly, we’re all human. The average Japanese soldier had a lot in approved with the average American soldier. The film is a tad heavy-handed in those connections, on occasion, but I personally had no quandary seeing the characters in “Letters” as sympathetic and dependable.
The performances in “Letters” are uniformly gracious. The script is tight and logical, the color palette refreshingly bleak, and the staging impressive. There is a positive dignity and honor in the film–a positive respectful sense of fright as we are led to the inevitable conclusion. A truly memorable and compassionate portion, I recommend “Letters” without reservation. KGHarris, 01/07.
This is a grand movie, and a truly new one, although not for the reasons that have been previously offered up by movie critics and fans.
First off, although this movie does narrate the Japanese side of the myth of the Battle of Iwo Jima, it does not glorify their role in this movie, nor does it ignore the lessons of history served up by this battle. For the few critics of this movie who say that the Japanese soldiers got what they deserved, that the Japanese started WWII, and that this movie only brings in undeserved sympathy for those soldiers, I say, as an American and a reader of military history, perhaps, but glance deeper into what this movie is REALLY saying.
Although American film critics have almost universally hailed this movie as an anti-war movie, this movie is in reality only an anti-bushido movie. The movie has been extremely well-liked in Japan, and I cannot but abet assume that its underlying messages wait on only to work against the cause of the resurgent and revisionist right-wing nationalist elements in Japan today. As the samurai coda of bushido itself is also in resurgence in Japan today, this movie comes none too soon as an antidote.
The movie has two centers - one is on the fictional and very hapless ex-baker Saigo, who has been drafted into the Japanese Army as a popular foot soldier; the other is the real-life portrayal of General Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander at Iwo Jima.
The movie makes sure how the rigid military discipline and samurai coda of bushido worked against the Japanese throughout the fight for Iwo Jima. For although this rigid discipline helped to prevent mass desertions and surrenders, thus enforcing the will of the military elite for these soldiers to fight to the death, it also resulted in stupidly ceremonial suicides when the soldiers were clearly defeated.
The samurai coda of bushido also led to an unwillingness to adapt and learn from previous mistakes. Kuribayashi, who had studied in America, and had studied previous Japanese island defeats against the Americans, actually had to fight his acquire fellow commanders to implement his defensive tactic of building caves and fortresses inland. Brief mention is made in this movie of how he was urged to not give up the beach entirely - and so the Japanese did set in some pillboxes overlooking the beach landing sites. The only result was that three months of hard work building the beach defenses would all be blown away in the first few hours of the preliminary American naval bombardment.
Above all else, the portrayal of Saigo, and of the failed Kempetai (Japanese secret police) soldier Shimizu note how brutal the Japanese military system was at the time to its occupy people. Both suffer harshly from the military system - Saigo’s bakery is regularly looted by the Kempetai and then finally ruined by the war, and his pregnant wife is left in tears when he is drafted into the war (”none of the men ever return”, she cries) . Saigo’s clumsy efforts at soldiering and general cynicism about the course of the war lead to beatings and near-death episodes at the hands of his officers. In a flashback during the movie, Shimizu’s failure to brutalize a Japanese family by killing their pet dog at his commander’s order is met with a beating from his qualified (Japanese commanders were authorized to physically beat their soldiers and underlings) and ejection from the Kempetai.
Most intriguing of all, the mass suicide with grenades, after Mount Suribachi had been taken by the Americans, is portrayed as a recount disobeyal of an order from General Kuribayashi to retreat, regroup, and fight again. The group suicide is demanded by one of the most fanatically bushido-driven of the officers. What a insensible man and slow belief! To end yourself when you can unruffled fight.
The one unfounded heed in the whole movie was the scene where the character of Lieutenant Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi talks to a captured American soldier. That this ever happened is highly dubious (I mean, this American soldier was carrying a flamethrower when he was shot - such soldiers were universally targeted for instant death whenever possible) . It seems to only have been thrown in for two reasons - to balance out an earlier scene where a captured American soldier was beaten and bayoneted to death, and as an opportunity for the Nishi character to pick in some exposition about himself. OK, Baron Nishi was a very incandescent historical character, winner of the Gold Medal in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics in Equestrian display jumping and friend to many Hollywood stars. But this whole scene impartial rang fake, and people in the theater audience snickered when the Nishi character started speaking Engrish.
All in all, this is a truly fresh work, exploring themes of the Japanese side of WWII that have never been explored before, either by Americans or the Japanese themselves.
Japanese works regarding WWII have invariably portrayed the Japanese characters, whether civilian (”Grave of the Fireflies”) or military (the fresh movie “Otoko-tachi no Yamato” and the book “Requiem for Battleship Yamato”, both about the last suicidal mission of the battleship) as tragic but daring victims of overwhelming American might, and about the biggest Deep Conception that one ever gets out of these Japanese works has been some sort of a vague admission that “all war is unpleasant”; there is never any exploration of the possibility that something in Japanese society itself at that time might have been terribly, stupidly detestable.
Yes, it was the brutal military rulers of Japan who stupidly threw the Japanese people into a war that they could not hope to bag, and then stupidly demanded mass suicide when their decisions failed. Bushido was the underlying principle that led to all of that. And “Letters from Iwo Jima” is the first movie ever to bring out these concepts, while showing at the same time its greatest respect for the Japanese soldiers forced to endure under the harsh rule of that military elite.
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