War Stories

Letters from Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood's companion to Flags of Our Fathers.

Clint Eastwood tells the other side of the story of his earlier “Flags of Our Fathers”. Decades after the battle of Iwo Jima, researchers unearth several hundred letters from Japanese soldiers never sent to their families. The letters put a human face on the men who fought one of the most brutal battles of World War 2. I saw this as a study of leadership, thanks to actor Ken Watanabe’s excellent portrait of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the architect of the Japanese plan of silence and ambush. Eastwood gives us an “ah ha” moment in a long shot of the American flag far away on one of the hilltops of the island, the flag made famous in the Life Magazine photograph.

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Read more from this blogger: Letters from Iwo Jima (R)—3 1/2 stars Opens January 12, 2007