Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Capone's pretty much rendered me Captain Redundant today, but I'll have my own review of this one up soon. I'm not even going to read his yet, because I don't want to know what he thought until I've written about it. I'm sure he's got plenty to say, though. Check it out:

Letters from Iwo Jima

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. Originally intended for release in the first quarter of 2007, this companion piece to director Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers was bumped up to late 2006 to qualify the film for awards consideration and perhaps boost the profile of the nearly forgotten Flags in the process. But a funny thing happened at critics' screenings all over the country. People quickly realized that Eastwood's Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima (which opens in very limited release today and wider on January 12) is a far more compelling film that its counterpart in its look at the battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers who fought there. I'm sure the distributor was convinced that audiences wouldn't necessarily flock to see a film in which it was predetermined that every single character would be dead by the end. And they were right: that's a tough sell. But it's so easy to see that Letters is one of the year's best offerings.

The film opens in the present day as a box filled with several hundred letters is excavated from beneath the ground on Iwo Jima. The letters are filled with messages to long-dead loved ones from the Japanese soldiers who died during that campaign. Letters by no means presents itself as pro- or anti-Japanese. But the contents of and stories in these letters (many of while are shown as flashbacks by Eastwood) present snapshots into the lives of these men, most of whom were too young to even start families or live fully realized lives. One of the more interesting stories is that of Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), a world-renowned equestrian who won the Olympics just before the war. Some have more mysterious pasts, such as Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a former MP who, for unknown reasons, was forced back into service after a shameful incident on the job.

The leader of the Japanese forces at Iwo Jima was Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe of The Last Samurai). His performance isn't just a personal best for the actor, but it is simply one of the greatest in the history of war movies. The character actually spent a great deal of time in America before the war, and flashbacks reveal that his presence at parties and receptions was received with a great deal of fascination even as tensions between the two nations were growing. His time in America is believed to give him some inside knowledge of how the U.S. military will attack this key island, but when he first sees the size the armada coming across the Pacific, he knows all is hopeless. But he wasn't going out without a fight, and the digging of the tunnels in the mountain that sat on the island was his idea and prolonged the fighting some 40 days.

Still, the Japanese troops were hopelessly outnumbered, starving, and desperate. In a sequence that will stay with me until I die, one small group of Japanese soldiers decides it would be better to commit suicide than retreat or be captured. In Flags of Our Fathers, we see the remnants of this decision as the U.S. troops move into the tunnels and hear the faint explosions of Japanese solider killing themselves with hand grenades. It was a grizzly experience seeing that in that movie, but here it's far worse as Eastwood opts to actually show us the entire process, one man at a time. They pull the pin, tap the grenade to their helmet, and hold it to their chest, one at a time. Torsos are ripped open; even the lower halves of their heads are torn off. And this happens at about the halfway point in the film, not at the end as I'd assumed it would.

These scenes are going to be talked about a great deal in the next month or so; that can't be helped. But they don't really represent what is so astonishing about Letters. This is a small, intimate work punctuated by moments of thundering battle and destruction. It feels as if roughly 75 percent of the movie takes place in the caves, only adding to the claustrophobia and tension between the men and their officers. The screenplay by Iris Tamashita (from a story by herself and Flags writer Paul Haggis) is staggeringly good and serves as a perfect counterpoint to Flags. Yes, they were the enemy, but in many ways they were also destined to lose and die in the process. Thankfully, Eastwood doesn't resort to cheap tactics like using overlapping actors and scenes between the two films.

These films exist as a sad reminder that war isn't just hell, but it's a taker of real human lives and not simply the lives of faceless, nameless opponents. Letters from Iwo Jima does actually enhance and make me appreciate Flags more than I did when I first saw it, but I think most would agree that Letters is the superior film, not just when compared to Eastwood's other epic, but when compared to nearly all of the films that were released in 2006.

Capone