One of the interesting things about Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima isn't so much that it's a cinematic rarity - an American-produced movie with a mostly-Japanese dialog soundtrack that qualified for a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film - but rather a celluloid bookend to another film by the same director, Flags of Our Fathers. Both films, released a few months apart in the fall of 2006, graphically depict the Battle of Iwo Jima (code named Operation Detachment by the Americans) from two different perspectives - the U.S. side's in Flags of Our Fathers, and the Japanese defenders' in Letters from Iwo Jima.

Considering the high cost of making an effects-heavy film, a less ambitious director-producer team might have chosen to "do" an Iwo Jima-based film in the same semi-documentary format used by Darryl F. Zanuck and Joseph E. Levine in A Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, which tell the stories of D-Day and Operation Market Garden from various nations' points of view.

But Eastwood and his co-producers Paul Haggis, Robert Lorentz and Steven Spielberg aren't afraid to take risks, and there's no bigger risk in film making than making a war movie at a time when their country is mired in a very unpopular conflict in Iraq...unless one is making two war movies....with one being presented almost entirely in Japanese.

Co-written by Haggis (In the Valley of Elah) with Iris Yamash!ta, Letters from Iwo Jima blends historical figures such as Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and Baron Takeichi Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) with fictional characters, particularly PFC Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya, a Japanese "boy band" singer and actor) and chronicles the battle of Iwo Jima from the day in 1944 when Kuribayashi assumes command of the island's Army contingent to March 26, 1945, when the Marines finally "secured" Iwo, over a month after the initial landings.

Clint Eastwood and his crew did an incredible job in making a Japanese-side-of-the-story counterweight to their All-American Flags of Our Fathers. Not only does the Academy Award-winning actor-director get outstanding performances from Watanabe, Ihara, and Ninomiya, but he makes the willing viewer see that soldiers, no matter which side they're on, are human beings with essentially the same virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, and hopes and fears.

Although Letters from Iwo Jima begins and ends in more-or-less present day time as did Flags of Our Fathers, it doesn't really veer back and forth across time as much. Instead, it is a very linear movie that focuses on the Japanese garrison, which includes the usual cast of stock characters from Japanese-themed war flicks - the cynical reluctant soldier, the overly aggressive and chauvinist officers who think Americans are soft and unworthy enemies, the Yamamoto-type of commander who has been educated in America and had friends there before the war, the mysterious replacement soldier who may or may not be a secret police man, and the obstinate Bushido bully who beats up soldiers who dare even joke about giving up Iwo to the gaijin invaders.

Whatever flashbacks there are, they are limited to Kuribayashi, who sometimes recalls his days as a student in the U.S., PFC Saigo, and the mysterious and aloof Superior Private Shimizu (Ryo Kase), who acts like a member of the Gestapo-like Kempeitai and is practically shunned by his fellow soldiers.

Of course, by the end of the 141-minute-long film, most of these characters have become casualties of war, and before it's over they - and we - have seen the ugliness and horror of battle up close and personally.

And although the famed fierceness of the Japanese soldier is depicted in the film (a dazed and confused Marine is brutally taken into a cave and bayoneted to death in one scene), the Americans are not always shown to be the paragons of justice that some other films make them out to be. Not only do they use - by necessity - such weapons as flamethrowers and explosives against the Japanese soldiers in their well-protected caves and tunnels, but in at least one instance, a Marine thinks it's more expedient to shoot a a pair of POWs rather than guard them.

Perhaps this - as well as the fact that like Flags, the movie was released during an unpopular war - explains why audiences in the U.S. basically ignored this film. Although a superbly shot, magnificently directed, extremely well-acted, and expertly edited movie, Letters from Iwo Jima only earned $13 million domestically, not enough to cover the $19 million that it cost to make. Worldwide, the film did better, earning some $50 million, helped, no doubt, by its popularity in Japan.

Pity, because Eastwood, Haggis, Yamash!ta, and everyone involved in the making of the movie did something unusual and daring when they made Letters from Iwo Jima. Not only is it a spectacular technical achievement, but it proves that war, no matter what side one is on, is hell for everyone...even for those whose cause wasn't exactly just.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age