Letters from Iwo Jima Blu-ray Review

Taking a black page from history, Eastwood delivers a stark, unflinching and humanist portrait of Japanese soldiers.

Reviewed by Greg Maltz, September 22, 2007
Clint Eastwood's Japanese perspective of the battle of Iwo Jima is like a cloud. In shifting shades of foreboding and despondence, the film delivers an account of events with the action of a war epic, the detail of a documentary and the emotional impact of a drama. Collectively, the experience of the Japanese troops takes on many forms. Some characters, including the leader, Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), are too complex to pin down firmly. Others, like the bumbling Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), are motivated only to return to their family and care nothing for the war or their superiors. From idealistic honor to bitter defeat to heartbroken fatalism, the spirit of the soldiers is given life decades after the war from the words they wrote on Iwo Jima. Using the troops' handwritten letters as a vehicle for his film, Eastwood attempts to focus his lens on the humanity of a battle that was inhuman.

General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), whose charter was to defend Iwo Jima against American forces, finds himself facing a superior military.

Hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima were concerned less with how to win than with how to die. Once mainland Japan leadership established that no reinforcements, tanks or planes could be spared in the defense of Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi and his men knew that the battle was essentially a suicide mission. Eastwood shows in brutal detail that the Japanese code of honor led many troops to pull their grenade pins and hold the explosive charges against their chests with grisly results. Other soldiers engaged in banzai missions at the command of their leaders. While those offensive tactics were largely effective against the poorly trained Chinese forces Japan faced earlier in the war, the US military made short work of the charging Japanese soldiers. Still, Letters from Iwo Jimo shows how the Japanese dug in to the island's rugged terrain to inflict maximum damage to the Americans.
At many points, the film dovetails with Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's sister production that portrays the war from the U.S. soldiers' perspective. In fact, both films were shot at the same time to make use of closely linked scenes. But where Flags of Our Fathers was mostly unsuccessful in establishing a strong emotional bond between the audience and the soldiers, Saigo was the key to the power of Letters from Iwo Jima. Through Saigo, the audience experienced not only the overall horror endured by Japanese forces, but also the moments of humanity. Saigo was the one character guided purely by human instincts and not by Japan's reckless chain of command. What the movie doesn't show is that Japan badly terrorized the people of China, the Philippines and other Asia/Pacific countries in the most inhuman ways imaginable. Iwo Jima was America's stepping stone--a key strategic base to eventually put a stop to Japan's war machine. And that is why the battle of Iwo Jima, in spite of its barren locale, was a critical front in the war and a worthy focal point in history.