Letters from Iwo Jima

In Letters from Iwo Jima, director Clint Eastwood complements his Flags of our Fathers by telling the story of the WWII battle for the tiny island of Iwo Jima from the other side, from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers charged with defending the island from the invading American forces.

The film follows several soldiers and officers in the Imperial Army: General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the commander of the forces on Iwo Jima who arrives on the island at the start of the film; Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a conscripted baker who has left behind his pregnant wife; Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an aristocratic champion horse rider; and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), Saigo’s friend. Through letters written to their loved ones we hear their thoughts and learn something of their past, which gives the film an intimate, personal feel that is, refreshingly, at odds with the epic scope of many war films. The entire first section of Letters from Iwo Jima is all set-up, carefully building up to the invasion of the island, dropping bits of information that show how outgunned the Japanese soldiers were and bringing us into the world of the characters.

The film is shot in the monochromatic colour of the black-blue sands of the beaches of Iwo Jima, in a minimalist visual style that lends considerable authenticity. The few sequences of large-scale destruction are impressive and sometimes hair-raising. A brief shot showing bombs raining destruction on the Japanese soldiers is scary and foreboding, and the extent of the American armada descending onto Iwo Jima is breathtakingly shown. Interestingly, there are no 'god's-eye view' shots in the film. Everything that is shown is as it would be from the perspective of the characters, with many close or medium shots, which forces us to identify with the Japanese soldiers. This identification results in a unique frisson when individual American soldiers--who usually represent the 'good guys'--finally appear to confront the Japanese.

In the last third of the film the attention to character pays off as we follow the ultimate fate of all the soldiers we have come to know. The situation they are in is hopeless, and how they react to their inevitable doom forms the compelling backbone of the film’s concluding passages and lends a dolorous, fateful tinge. The triumph of Letters from Iwo Jima is that it gives a face to an adversary that is usually faceless in fictional depictions of WWII, and shows the Japanese soldiers to be as scared, ruthless, fractionous, flawed, brave, and human as their Allied counterparts.

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is a bold, valuable counterpoint to other western World War II films.

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Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Iris Yamashita, based on a story by Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis and the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi, edited by Tsuyoko Yoshida

Starring:
Ken Watanabe...General Tadamichi Kuribayashi
Kazunari Ninomiya...Saigo
Tsuyoshi Ihara...Baron Nishi
Ryo Kase...Shimizu
Shido Nakamura...Lieutenant Ito