REVIEW: Letters from Iwo Jima

I finally got around to seeing Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima last Sunday night after the film I was going to see (Rag Tag, a British film about a romace between a Nigerian boy and a West Indian boy in London) at the Pan African Film Festival got its screening time postponed from 7:10pm to 11:10pm suddenly.

Anyway, although I am generally a fan of Clint Eastwood's films (I agreed with the Academy two years ago that Million Dollar Baby should win Best Picture ahead of The Aviator, Sideways, Ray and Finding Neverland (or as the other half likes to call this last one, "the pretty mommy dying of cancer movie.") However I completely disagreed with the kudos heaped upon Mystic River since I think it's a bad adaptation of a pedestrian novel. I just saw The Good, The Bad and The Ugly for the first time last weekend on television and although some people think that's the Best Western ever made I would put my money on the Eastwood-directed Unforgiven. It can't be denied that three Best Directing (and Best Picture) nominations in four years is pretty impressive. However, again I must dissent from the kudos showered upon an Eastwood picture, this time it's Letters from Iwo Jima.

The premise sounds promising, especially after stinking up the joint with Flags of our Fathers, Clint decided to tell the story of the famous World War II battle from the perspective of the Japanese combatants. For me the script (by newcomer Iris Yamashita and Paul "the man" Haggis) is predictable and sloppy. The audience goes into the film with the knowledge that almost all of the Japanese soldiers must die, but it is very clear that one particular soldier must survive since the film follows him so closely. The screenplay loses credibility and reduces verisimilitude by saving the life of this soldier not once, not twice, but three times through too-neatly timed coincidental interventions.

My other complaint is that the film is quite bloody and explicitly violent, which, yes, is an unusal complaint for war movie. We already know "war is hell" and we don't need images of bloody body parts and badly mauled corpses to confirm this.

The most interesting aspect of the film to me was the depiction of the different mental states and psychologies of the Japanese. They ran the gamut from the officers who desperately wanted to kill themselves with their "honor" intact, to soldiers who were just mindlessly following orders to soldiers who just did not want to die.

Although it is refreshing to see a World War II movie where Americans do not play the central or starring role Letters from Iwo Jima still disappoints on other levels.

GRADE: B-.