- This movie was loads better than Flags of our Fathers, which wasn’t terrible but wasn’t fantastic either. If you skipped FooF (hahaha, best abbreviation ever), you wouldn’t miss much.
- Eastwood didn’t go overboard in integrating footage from the first film into this one. There were certain spots where my brain immediately recalled that I had seen these particular images before, but they were mostly in the form of battle shots from a distance or from inside the tunnels the Japanese had dug. What I really liked was even when there was footage used where you knew Ryan Phillippe was in the scene — the six or seven guys trying to take the hill at one point in FooF — Eastwood never really referenced the characters from the other movie by providing close-ups or any other major identifying features. [I'm not entirely certain, but I think we might have heard Phillippe's voice at one point, though.] They were always too far away for you to be able to pick out who was who. The only time the camera gets close enough to see the faces of the American soldiers, it’s a different group of men all together, which I think worked well.
- I like that this movie doesn’t demonize the Japanese. One of the issues that was raised in The Good German was that you could be German without being a Nazi and that you could be German without being complicit in the atrocious crimes against humanity your superior officers were ordering and committing. The same is true for the Japanese in this movie; it doesn’t try to whitewash anything they might have done during WWII, but it also shows them a lot more human than we’ve ever gotten to see them before. Getting drafted sucks for everyone, not just Americans.
- I can’t imagine having to go into battle knowing that you’ve basically already lost. It probably sucks even harder when the honourable thing to do in your culture is to kill yourself rather than retreat; sadly, many of the soldiers could have fallen back and helped out at another strategic point on the island, but their commanding officers ordered them to kill themselves instead. There was a nice contrast between the old school Japanese generals and Ken Watanabe’s character, who had been living in California, and how they chose to govern their men, with Watanabe recognizing that considering they don’t have too many soldiers to spare, maybe they shouldn’t be beating/killing the ones they do have.
- The film starts with a bunch of Japanese excavators digging up this old sack in one of the tunnels on Iwo Jima and it’s obvious, though they don’t yet show it, that this sack contains a whole bunch of unsent letters from Iwo Jima (so it’s not just a clever name). I was actually sort of amazed at how hokey and predictable the ending was. I was sitting there thinking that it would end with a big jumble of letters, with the writer of each letter reading it aloud and all the voices would be intermingled so that you couldn’t quite pick out the contents of any one letter. So not only does exactly that happen, but the letters are basically flying around the tunnel like it’s the Dursleys’ living room and I whispered to Audrey “There’s post on Sundays on Iwo Jima!” Very silly and cloying and sentimental, Mr. Eastwood, I expect more from you.
- The only other thing I felt hit over the head with was the “Wow, the Japanese soldiers are JUST LIKE US!” angle. This theme was fairly low-key throughout the film until the Japanese take an American prisoner named Sam and try to nurse him back to health; when Sam eventually dies, one of the Japanese soldiers finds a letter from his mom that he’s holding in his hand and proceeds to read it aloud. Of course, to the shock of the Japanese — who, up to this point, have been indoctrinated by their generals with how weak the Americans are, etc. — it turns out that American soldiers have moms that are pretty similar to Japanese moms and, what’s more, the soldiers themselves are pretty similar to the Japanese soldiers. If they had just left that bit out where someone actually has to come right out and explain this parallel to the audience, I think it would have been much better. It’s not like it was something that was hard to pick up on.
- I do wonder if we’ll start seeing more war films from the perspectives of non-Allied countries. I think part of the reason this one works is that the Japanese ultimately lose — although they do so with honour, grace, and respect — and that makes it okay to examine the psyche of The Enemy. I really can’t remember, but has anything similar every been attempted from a German perspective?
- The funniest part of the movie is when these two Japanese soldiers decide they want to surrender, but since this is not a terribly honourable course of action, they have to be sneaky about it. The one guy is to go ahead of the other guy, with the second guy following later under the auspices of “looking” for the first guy. So then they’re trying to come up with an excuse for the first guy to leave and the second guy says “Pretend you have dysentery. Show me your best dysentery face.” The first guy starts contorting like he’s in a great deal of pain and the second guy has a look on his face like “Wow, that’s the most pathetic dysentery face I’ve ever seen.” Who knew you could make dysentery funny?
Letters From Iwo Jima
The stronger of Clint Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima films.
IMDB Plot Synopsis The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.