Letters From Iwo Jima

Year: 2006

Grade: C-

Country: USA

Director: Eastwood

Review

another disappointment. why this film has gotten more oscar consideration than eastwood’s other film (flags of our fathers) that was released this year, is beyond me. the other, while not great, told a better story with more interesting characters. this one is a more weepy picture, sure, but it’s not better. the look of the film was interesting enough to capture my thoughts for about 12 minutes. trouble is that that left 120 minutes of film to watch. what eastwood should have done is combine the two picture into one, three hour epic. it would have forced him to trim the fat on each film and reduce the stories to their essence: humanizing war. instead, though, he took the “tora! tora! tora!” route and split it into two pictures: one showing the japanese side and one showing the american side. what results is one picture that’s decent and another that’s not very good at all. visually interesting, otherwise it’s a rather simple film. the single scene in “all quiet on the western front” which shows the protagonist in the trenches with an enemy soldier he’s just killed is as profound as anything this film has to offer.

Watched in theater