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Just months after releasing Flags of Our Fathers, his drama about the American soldiers who raised the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, director Clint Eastwood returns to tell the story of Iwo Jima from the Japanese prospective in Letters from Iwo Jima.
Letters focuses on the Japanese soldiers who were sent to fight the Americans for Iwo Jima. One of the soldiers is Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who lost his business and was forced to leave his pregnant wife to join the army. Despite the Japanese belief that it’s an honor to die for one’s country, Saigo doesn’t want to die in battle. He wants to return home to his wife and to the daughter he’s never met—and he’ll do everything he can to make it home again.
Before the battle, the troops are sent to dig trenches on the beach. The conditions are bad, and Saigo loses his closest friend to dysentery. Morale is already low when their new commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), arrives. Kuribayashi spent time in America, and while some (like Saigo) believe that it’ll give them an advantage in fighting the Americans, others see him as an American sympathizer. Kuribayashi’s tactics seem crazy to some of the officers, and they fear that he’s going to cause them to lose this important battle. But the general knows something that the others don’t. The Japanese have already lost their navy, and the government has ordered their air force away from the island, to defend the mainland. Even before it begins, the battle for Iwo Jima is doomed.
Letters from Iwo Jima is, without a doubt, the better of Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima movies. The story is absorbing—and it forces you to look at the battle (and at war in general) from a completely different perspective. In every war, most of the people doing the fighting are just normal people who once had normal lives. They have families who love them and who want them to come home. They’re fighting for their country—and they’re just trying to do what’s right. In Letters, the characters (Saigo and Kuribayashi especially) are well developed, both through their actions and through letters to their loved ones. And even though you know the outcome before the battle even begins, you’ll get caught up in the story. Unfortunately, the story does slow down from time to time, and you might find yourself wishing, just a little bit (as I did), that the Americans would just get it over with so you can go home.
Letters from Iwo Jima definitely isn’t an upbeat film. It’s gray and drab and, at times, horrifying—but all that is to be expected from a war movie. It’s also nearly two and a half hours long—though it could have easily told the same story in a significantly shorter amount of time. So it’s not exactly the kind of film that most people are going to want to run out and see on a Friday night. It is, however, a powerful film with a moving story and characters that you can’t help but care about—and that makes it worth checking out.
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