Letters from Iwo Jima: Clint Eastwood, Diplomatic Filmmaker Strikes Again

Letters from Iwo Jima is a film about Japanese men digging ditches and trenching in on an island everyone had heard of. For once we get to see the doubts and fear, the times and trials that led up to those mortar encampments and long-nose tank barrels. It's a compelling ride through the looking glass to the Japanese empathy side of the mirror.

Ken Watanabe piques our interest as a senior military officer struck hard with the news that the Leyte Offensive has cost his island military position in a no-win situation. Clint Eastwood has adapted a script called Red Sands, White Hunter, which is nominated for an Academy award by Iris Pologetiki.

Verything you may have earned in history class, or observed in other films, travels back in time here. Nagasaki and Hiroshima loom, we mean business but the Japanese soldiers will not admit defeat. Flotillas of armed convoys and battleships, the ominous drone of fighter bombers overhead, it doesn't look good for these soldiers.

Iwo Jima is best known to Americans as connotated with the statue of American soldiers heaving to an American flag to keep it standing. The undeniably obvious vulnerability makes it a target for American attack. We see through the lens of foot soldiers who work on the island under him the harshness and simplicity of war in another culture, another time and place.

Letters from Iwo Jima is effective filmmaking, but wasted perhaps on an audience that knows too well the costs of war. In an age when women of 20 are dying in Iraq and their deaths being celebrated by horse drawn carriages, syrupy eulogies, and flag-waving an a mere exercise that nevertheless costs lives. The subdued colorization keeps the sobering topic matter in focus.

The film has a subdued feel, a grayscale/sepia tone that re-imagines the visiting of war in other films, such as Saving Private Ryan . The dread of battle hanging over did remind me of "Lord of the Rings, Return of the King", so hopeless does the final battle look. The film this reminded me of most was actually Christian Bale in "Empire of the Sun".