Directed by Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima is the better half to Flags of Our Fathers and depicts the Japanese side of the landmark battle of WWII.
The film is centered on the story of a young soldier named Saigo. He was once a baker with his wife and now a reluctant soldier. His attitude is on the verge of treason, so he keeps his mouth shut, despite his ideals. But it’s his unsoldier like traits that allow him to do great things in the battle and preserve historic treasures.
As the battle draws nearer, the outlook becomes grimmer. The mainland isn’t sending air or naval support to the troops on Iwo Jima. The generals realize that the battle will become a suicide mission, and they encourage their men to die with honor.
This sort of honor might be controversial and horrifying to some people. In Japanese culture, it is more honorable to commit suicide than to be captured by the enemy. Images of soldiers standing together in a cave, with the silent pressure to take their turn pulling the pin of a grenade, pushing the button against their helmets and clutching it to explode on the cave walls and their comrades are disturbing to say the least. I usually love blood and gore, but with the theme of suicide, I was being pushed to limits I didn’t know I had. This was one of the first times I wanted the realism toned down. Eastwood is welcome to take that as an honor and a burden for my nightmares at the same time.
In the battle scenes, this feels like Saving Private Ryan on Iwo Jima. They’re just as intense, graphic and chaotic, it even does a few seconds of first person camera to engage you in the battle more. One thing Letters did that Ryan didn’t was make me much more fearsome of a flamethrower.
A word of caution, the entire film is in Japanese. So if you’re not into reading subtitles the whole time, maybe check out Flags of Our Fathers instead. That film might make you feel a little more patriotic, instead of watching the good men we fought against so long ago.
“We can die here, or we can continue fighting. Which would better serve the emperor?”
The Best Picture Project 
Good write up. I watched this for the first time recently and absolutely loved it. As you mentioned, the scene in the cave when the soldiers are using grenades to commit suicide was horrifying.
While “Letters from Iwo Jima” is truly a great achievement is several ways, the script is powerful, the production is superb, all the technical departments almost perfected their jobs, there is some really good acting as well, and Eastwood’s touch as a director is very visible, and its beautiful, it flaws almost flawlessly in this regard.
Well, what’s wrong then? It simply lacks what makes it a really interesting movie. “Letters” starts with a present day scene of excavators digging up remains of the war in Iwo Jima, and finding letters in a cave that were written by Japanese soldiers and officers during the war on Iwo Jima island, it then travels back in time to WWII and story revolves around those whom their letters were found during the dawn of the American invasion on that island. Slowly, the movie loses its grip over its audience, becoming something closer to an audio book, and survival becomes a repetitive process!!!
Everyone seem to be praising the film for being told from the other side, and its true you don’t see that many American film makers do that, and although the film didn’t just speak Japanese, it lived and breathed Japanese, it couldn’t escape the limited framework of Hollywood, this is very visible through the “good” characters, all the good, honest or lovable Japanese characters were either American sympathizers who lived in the US for a while and kept saying how a great nation the US is, or are Japanese people that do not care for the Imperial system and would not mind handing over the island to their rival Americans. On the other hand, all Japanese loyalists were mean American haters. Even the resolution of the strict Imperial soldiers was that the Americans were not as evil as they were told. But still, everyone was very fond of the fact that the movie was told completely from a Japanese point of view. However, just because Eastwood is an American film maker making a Japanese-point-of-view movie, doesn’t make the film any better than what it really is, the film’s ratings seem to be getting higher just because there is an American film maker behind it and I disagree, it is what it is regardless who the people behind it were.
The film was also highly praised as a companion film to “Flags”, and while together they form a great duo, on its own, “Letters” does not achieve greatness.
Why did Eastwood and Spielberg decide to make “Letters from Iwo Jima” this calm instead of making an adrenaline-pumping film? My guess is that they did not care about the average audience and the commercial success as much as they did care for the story’s integrity.