Letters From Iwo Jima

After watching The Last Samurai two nights ago, last night I decided that it was time for another Japanese war movie. This one's often described as a "companion piece" to Clint Eastwood's other 2006 flick, Flags of Our Fathers. Having seen both, I can attest like the majority of people who have seen both that Letters is the better film. It was very moving and powerful in addition to offering plenty of insight as far as what it was like on the Japanese side of the conflict. However, it wasn't a perfect film. Sadly, it seems Eastwood couldn't bring himself to depict his country and their forces as the brute savages that the Japanese considered them to be. While there is one very strong scene depicting an American soldier acting without morals or kindness at all, you're never really left thinking that the Americans are evil, even as you see Japanese soldiers getting gunned down by them. Perhaps that's because you naturally empathize much more with the Americans, but in my mind, a fantastic movie can make you start to question what you thought you knew about human nature. A few of the Japanese generals are sympathetic to their American POWs and even their own men, but we learn via flashbacks that these officers spent time, prior to the war, in America. So what you take home is that all of the Japanese higher-ups are brutal death-lovers except for those who have been to the more modern country of their enemies. As I said, the movie is flawed in this regard; Eastwood has managed to lead me to believe that the Japanese are the good guys, but he really hasn't gotten me to view the Americans with the same fear and hatred that the Japanese did. Thus, I'm not completely sharing their point of view. A small part of the problem is that when we hear Americans shouting or talking to each other, we fully comprehend what they're saying. Here's a thought. What if Eastwood had made it such that, instead of comprehensible English, the Americans spoke in some sort of garbled pseudo-language? You know, like the one in The Sims. There was a scene in Lost once where we finally come to see things through the Korean foreigner Jin's eyes, and when the other characters speak, the audio is played backwards, achieving the garbled gibberish effect I'm talking about. That could have done wonders here. Still, despite all of my suggestions, I'm only saying that a film that's already an 8 could have been a 9. It's definitely better than Flags if you're only looking to watch one of the two, and I'd recommend it to anyone, especially fans of grenade-based suicide.