2 posts tagged “war”

Please forgive the lack of reviews!  I need to get more on the ball with them.

Today I saw Letters from Iwo Jima, which is the companion to Flags of Our Fathers, which I reviewed here.  To be honest, I have no idea why Letters is getting more attention than Flags, because I liked Flags much better.

Ken Watanabe is nice to watch in this movie, but he is the only real high point.  I didn't particularly have sympathy for the other main character, a foot soldier named Saigo.

Actually, wait a minute.  Maybe I know why Letters isn't as strong - not because it's the "other side," but because we didn't have as much to go on.  One of my favorite things about Flags of Our Fathers was that it really showed what the fighting was like - I felt like I didn't have to just imagine the Battle of Iwo Jima, I was watching it.  In comparison, Letters feels forced and surreal...more like a movie than a documentary or any other actual depiction.  But again, perhaps this is because there weren't many Japanese survivors of Iwo Jima.  The movie is largely based on letters sent home and drawings, and we don't have the same kind of actual first-hand knowledge that we do of the American perspective.  So maybe that's why it's not as strong.

And yet I think it may also have to do with the lack of sympathy for the characters.  The only ones that I really felt for were General Kuribayashi and Takeichi Nishi (the equestrian), who was played by Tsuyoshi Ihara.  Those two performances were outstanding...the rest of the movie, not so much.  I wasn't touched at all by Kazunari Ninomiya's performance...the guy is from a boy band, it's like watching Justin Timberlake trying to act.

But I can't help but give major kudos to Clint Eastwood for telling both sides of the story.  For decades, Americans have only known our side of Iwo Jima.  In fact, I would imagine that many Americans, when they think of the Japanese soldiers in the battle, still think of them as worthless slime, even if the modern image of the Japanese people is much improved.  And for that matter, it's hard to remember that we thought the Japanese were so evil.  How could any people be seen as evil?  How could we not sympathize with the regular people of another culture?  We did it with the Soviets too, and I think we're not immune to it in the current war in Iraq, either.  So let Letters from Iwo Jima be a lesson to us...the other side has a family too.

I went to the movies this weekend and saw Flags of Our Fathers, a WWII-themed movie that would not normally interest me.  But Flags of Our Fathers was actually quite good.  It's the story of Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, a key photograph from World War II that won the Pulitzer Prize.  Although the movie has some rather grisly scenes of the fighting itself, the story is not about the war - it's about the men who raised the flag, their comrades, and what became of them.  If it had been a traditional war movie I wouldn't have been as interested as I found myself throughout the film.

The narrative is a little loose, perhaps the fault of the director, Clint Eastwood.  The first part of the movie is mostly about the battle, and the second part is mostly about the aftermath and the picture, but there are flashbacks and jumps forward in time for both parts of the movie.  The battle scenes are almost monochromatic while the scenes back home are more vibrant, so it's easy to tell what part of the movie you're in - but, like Memento, it's confusing at times because of all the jumps.

I did appreciate the battle scenes, though.  I hadn't ever really known what the fighting in WWII actually looked like.  But the movie conveys very well what it was like to prepare for arrival, to land on the island, to seek out the enemy, and to be engaged - or killed - in combat.  I actually found the battle scenes to be somewhat educational.