Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" is a sober, haunting film, filled with striking images that I thought as I was watching the movie would stick with me longer than they did. I found myself admiring the movie very much, but not feeling greatly passionate about it one way or the other. It didn't resonate with me the way other films like saving Private Ryan or even black hawk dawn.
But Yes,
I enjoyed this movie. The action scenes made some of my adrenaline run, made me even connect emotionally to the Japanese despair over the overwhelming American invasion. However, the movie is a bit too long. You know how it is about war movies that try/are emotional, too many scenes of soldiers dying like ducks and landscape shots that at first strike you as brutal but then just become repetitive. I don't mean they're unnecessary, but they were still prolonged a little too much.
Then, the Japanese point of view is nice to see, but in my opinion seems a little too forced anyway. About a possible historical lesson, I was hoping to learn a little more.. not a bad point, just not a great point.
About the movie which is Entirely in Japanese (with English subtitles), *Letters* finds the heart of its three main characters through the written medium: Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) – a young baker, conscripted during his wife's pregnancy, writes to her of his trench tribulations, while trying to make good on his promise to stay alive and return home to his new daughter; General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) – assigned to pull Iwo Jima from the jaws of defeat, writes to his wife of his American travels before the war, his fears in facing that superior enemy, and laments that he found no time to fix the kitchen floor; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) - Kuribayashi's fellow officer and friend, a 1932 Los Angeles Olympian equestrian reads a letter from the soldier's mother ("do what is right because you know it is right").
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