Friday, 09 January 2009

Eastwood´s War Epic Depicts WWII Massacre Print E-mail
By Mirja Krause   
Friday, 23 March 2007
 
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Cinema icon Clint Eastwood’s twenty-eighth film direction Letters from Iwo Jima sees Japanese soldiers trying to defend the strategic island of Iwo Jima against vast US forces outnumbering them.

In the last days of World War Two, Iwo Jima – seven hundred miles from Kyushu and Shikoku, Japan’s third and fourth largest islands – is targeted by America as a launch pad for a B-24 bombing campaign on Japan.

This Oscar-winning film completes the two-part drama Eastwood began with Flags of our Fathers in 2006. Flags, based on the novel of the same name by US writer James Bradley, depicted the attack from the point of view of the American soldiers.

Iwo Jima shows the battle from the Japanese viewpoint and is based on two novels, Picture Letters from Commander in Chief compiled from the letters of Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the general played by Ken Wattanabe in the film, and So Sad To Fall In Battle:An Account of War by first-time book writer Kumiko Kakehashi. Much of the movie was filmed on Iwo Jima itself, where more than 20,000 Japanese troops died.

I came hoping this would show the feelings of the common soldier on the ground, not generals in comfy office chairs whose plans involved not so much as stepping foot on the battleground. In this respect Letters from Iwo Jima did not disappoint.

The film is perhaps at its most successful balancing character development with action scenes. You learn gradually about each character and his background. Each has a story to tell, from a baker to a Kempeitai military police outcast, to an Olympic equestrian champion, a lieutenant-colonel, to the general himself, a resident in America not long before the war began. These stories within a story make the film fascinating.

Screenwriter Iris Yamahita, a second-generation Japanese-American, has been quoted as saying “the narrative just sprang to life…as if the characters were just begging to have their stories told.”

The regularity of the action is appropriate. The traumatic scenes – charges, mowings down by machine gun, the falling of brave men, people slaughtered by the dozens, blood everywhere, hand grenades exploding, tearing everything and everybody apart – announce a genre piece.
 
But it's the ability of Clint Eastwood to make people empathise for his various characters, not the blood and gore, that got him his Oscar and Golden Globe for best foreign language film 2007. If you're on the edge of watching Letters, wonder no more. The story is touching and the characters very well developed.

This movie is worth its ticket price.

 




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