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Letters from Iwo Jima: DVD Review
Oscar-Nominated Flick Now Out on DVD Revisits WWII Battle from
Japanese Perspective
By Kam Williams
When Clint Eastwood came up with novel idea of
making two movies about the same historic WWII battle, little did he
know that the one shot from the enemies’ perspective would turn out to
be far more moving. For while Flags of Our Fathers was just a
Hollywood-style rehash of the ubiquitous, patriotic-style propaganda
from the Forties, Letters from Iwo Jima is comprised of contrasting
character portraits of soldiers torn between dying with honor and the
very human instinct of self-preservation.
Among the sympathetically-portrayed men we meet are
Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who desperately wants to survive to
see his newborn baby; General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), a Westernized
gent who has enjoyed visiting the United States; Lieutenant Ito (Shido
Nakamura), a proud soul inclined to commit suicide rather than
surrender; and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a young MP new to battle who is
worried how he will respond to his first taste of combat.
It would take the GIs 40 days to prevail, since the
defenders had dug themselves deep into a subterranean maze of caves
carved across the island and into the face of Mount Suribachi. The movie
makes it quite clear that the Japanese knew they would lose even before
the assault began, yet they were under strict orders to fight till the
bitter end.
In the face of that futility, they spend as much
time writing letters to loved ones, reminiscing about the good old days,
and musing about the meaning of life, as they do in the furious
firefight against the Americans. Nominated for four Academy Awards
(including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay),
and winning the Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Language Film category,
Letters from Iwo Jima exudes an undeniable emotional honesty likely to
touch the heart of even the most embittered veteran of the Pacific
theater.
After all, if we returned that barren pile of black
volcanic ash in 1968, why not posthumously recognize the humanity of the
over 20,000 Japanese who perished there, too?
Very good (3 stars)
Rated R for graphic war violence.
In Japanese with subtitles
Running time: 140 minutes
Studio: Warner Home Video
2-Disc DVD Extras: Press conference, “The Making of” plus a couple of
other featurettes
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Lloyd Kam Williams
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 Lloyd
Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who
writes for 100+ publications around the U.S. and Canada. He is a member of
the African-American Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics
Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee, and Rotten Tomatoes. In
addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from
Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam
lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.
IMDiversity.com is committed to presenting diverse points of view.
However, the viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of
the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or
employees at IMD.
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