Letters From Iwo Jima Full
Letters from Iwo Jima summary of box office results, charts and release information and related links. Oscars, Including One Win. View full award breakdown.
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It's a simple establishing shot: a tilt up from the beach where the Allied forces landed to Mount Suribachi, a rocky knob on the southern tip of the island where the Japanese holed up in a network of tunnels and bunkers, and on top of which the famous, iconic image of the raising of an American flag was taken. That classically heroic-looking photo, and the collateral damage from its exploitation as a propaganda tool to sell War Bonds, was the subject of Eastwood's 2006 'Flags of our Fathers,' the companion piece (or other half) of 'Letters From Iwo Jima,' though it doesn't really matter which one you see first.
The opening moments of 'Letters' have a cosmic zoom-like effect, taking us from the timeless and abstract (stars/sand) into a specific place and time: 'Iwo Jima 2005,' as a title denotes. It was on this barren little sulfuric spec in the Pacific Ocean, only about five miles from one end to the other, that so many people fought and died 60 years ago.
'Flags of Our Fathers' ended with a similar motion, going from memory-images of surviving Marines frolicking in the surf, to the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi and the battleships in the harbor, and finally up into the sky (another reason you might think you're looking up rather than down at the start of 'Letters,' which begins with a view in the opposite direction from the close of 'Flags'). The camouflaged artillery that proved so deadly and menacing in 'Flags' are, by the start of 'Letters,' just rusty relics at a war memorial site. Free font proxima nova. Archeologists explore Suribachi's caves and tunnels, still marveling at how the soldiers ever managed to build them.
And then we're on the beach again, in 1945, as Japanese soldiers prepare for the invasion they know is coming by digging trenches in the sand. It looks like a futile, Sisyphean effort. In a letter to his wife (heard in voiceover) one of the diggers, a puppy-faced former baker named Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya, in a thoroughly winning performance), writes philosophically: 'This is the hole that we will fight and die in.'
They might have died a lot sooner if they'd stuck with this ill-conceived sand strategy. When the new commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (the always-commanding Ken Watanabe), arrives at Iwo Jima, he immediately changes plans, ordering men and artillery to dig in on higher ground. These are the preparations for the massive ambush we see in 'Flags of Our Fathers.'
The Japanese, who are seen as fierce, highly organized fighters in 'Flags,' aren't as well-prepared, or well-equipped, as we may have thought. Dashing Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), the Olympic equestrian star who once partied with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Hollywood, appears on the island with his horse, as a symbolic morale-boost for the men. But in a conversation with Kuribayashi over a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Nishi approaches the military reality they face in an indirect manner: 'When you think about it,' Nishi offers, 'it is regrettable that most of the Combined Fleet was destroyed.' This is the first news Kuribayashi has had of that particular catastrophe -- but he already knows he doesn't have the manpower or weaponry he needs to resist the pending invasion. (Again, parallels to under-equipped American soldiers being asked to hold ground in Iraq without the necessary material support from their leaders at home is a part of the movie's frame of reference.)
'The Imperial Headquarters is deceiving not just the people but us as well,' Kuribayashi says. It's a line that could have been adapted from 'Flags of Our Fathers,' which was also an examination of various forms of propaganda, codes of honor, and nationalistic symbolism that are among the primary weapons in any war.
When young Saigo is conscripted into the Japanese army, he and his pregnant wife are stunned at the response of his neighbors and friends who, like brainwashed cultists, keep repeating that he is fortunate to be chosen to die for his country. The emphasis here is on the honor conveyed by death itself -- something we see later in the film when soldiers, aware that they're engaged in a hopeless battle, choose to kill themselves rather than fight to the death. One can't help recalling the words attributed to Gen. George S. Patton in 1944: 'Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.'
Letters From Iwo Jima Full Movie
In both his films, Eastwood empathizes with the 'expendable' soldier on the ground, the 'poor bastard' who is only a pawn in a war conceived by generals and politicians, some of whom have never come anywhere near a battlefield or a combat zone. And Eastwood fully commits to a boots-on-the-ground POV: The raising of the American flag, presented as a routine, off-hand task to the soldiers in 'Flags of Our Fathers' (and which would have remained that way if a photographer had not been present), is only glimpsed obliquely from afar by the Japanese in 'Letters from Iwo Jima.' Life or death, heroism or folly: It all comes down to which side you're on, and which piece of ground you're occupying, at any given moment in the battle.
- An even more sombre affair, as beautifully restrained as the earlier film but also, despite its scenes of battle, death, suicide and suffering, shockingly intimate.
- The movie's sense of doom is powerfully conveyed; one graphic scene has weeping soldiers blowing themselves up with grenades.
- Indirectly but cogently comment on our experiences of other movies. Having Japanese soldiers as heroes allows us to reconsider the didacticism we've been handed in the past.
- The proper way to appreciate Letters and Flags is to treat them as complimentary halves of the same epic movie, a Godfather war epic. One half is plainly more ambitious than the other, but both have virtues that distinguish them.
- By placing us on the opposite side of the battlefield, the movie forces us to approach it from a fresh perspective. The technique also lends Letters an uncommon timelessness.
- Where Flags heaved its characters through war and psychic trauma without first allowing us all to get acquainted, Letters takes such care with its protagonists that they awaken and descend from the screen.
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1/19/2007 by Robert Denerstein
Eastwood is now 76, and Letters has the feel of a movie made by a man of experience. Almost stately in its tone, Letters reflects the wisdom of living; it's interested in observing how men behave when they know they can't win.- Letters is a work of whetted craft and judgment, tempered by Eastwood's years of life, moviemaking and the potent tango of the two. It is the work of a mature filmmaker willing to entertain the true power of the cinema.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
1/13/2007 by Colin Covert
Humanizing our old adversaries doesn't erase their war crimes, and Eastwood doesn't whitewash the brutality of Japanese militarism. His point is that the Emperor's infantrymen were as much the victims of the Japanese war machine as the GIs they fought.- Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple, the movie examines notions of wartime glory as closely as Flags of Our Fathers dissected heroism.
- In both his films, Eastwood empathizes with the 'expendable' soldier on the ground, the 'poor bastard' who is only a pawn in a war conceived by generals and politicians, some of whom have never come anywhere near a battlefield or a combat zone.
- If Flags of Our Fathers is about heroism -- why we need it, how we create it -- then Letters From Iwo Jima is about honor, its importance, and its folly.
- It skillfully avoids the usual war movie clichs while providing multiple points of entry.
- Watanabe is appropriately noble and regal, if a bit stiff at times; but it is Ninomiya's grunt soldier who gives the film its soul. Alternately philosophical, humorous, terrified and crafty, he is everyman trying to survive hell.
- Though it could have gone in that direction, Eastwood's film isn't an existential endgame drama. He's still more rooted in Howard Hawks than Samuel Beckett and in many ways this is a conventional war drama.
- Side by side, though, Eastwood's movies are a sobering marvel: the massive military effort, suffering and sacrifice, the extremes of human behavior that war produces.
- In washed-out tones of brown and khaki, mimicking the colors of the troops' uniforms (blood, used sparingly, is startlingly crimson, seeming to sear a hole in the screen), the film plays out in a mood of resignation and control.
- The unspoken message of the film is that war is a battle of competing symbols and ideologies that have no meaning. We create artificial divisions to hide the fact that we are all the same under the skin, with the same hopes, desires and fears.
- In the last half-hour, the story, like the Japanese, loses its way; lacking any clear-cut goals except survival, the film becomes repetitive. Letters From Iwo Jima is a necessary movie; too bad it's not a great movie.
- [This] absorbing and thoughtful take on the plight of the trapped, desperate and suicidal Japanese troops, outstrips its companion piece. That's not a statement on patriotism; it addresses the nature of Eastwood's approach and basic human nature.