Reviewed by
Len Glasser

A masterpiece! An incredible film! Brilliant!

All these superlatives apply to this phenomenal effort by Clint Eastwood. Alfred Hitchcock once said that a director will do his best work before he's 55, and then everything he does after that is downhill. Evidently Mr. Hitchcock was speaking only for himself. This film is clearly one of the best war films ever made.  The battle scenes are even more terrifying than Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg is co-producer).

But this film is much more than just gory battle scenes. It examines the most intense battle in the Pacific of WW2 from the enemy side. Unlike other anti-war films, Eastwood doesn't show us the Japanese soldiers as nice guys, just caught in the crossfire of war. He shows them as good soldiers, loyal  and obedient to their military code, which was  fundamentally insane and  brutal. The penalty for any  perceived disobedience in the ranks was a vicious beating or even beheading.

The film centers around 2 characters, One, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and the other, Sagio (Kazunari Ninomiya) a private, who in civilian life was a baker.  The General, a brilliant career officer, is fighting what he knows to be a hopeless cause because of his total loyalty to Japan and his Emperor, which supercedes any logic in the face of the massive American invasion force.  Still, Kuribayashi devises unprecedented tactics that prolong the battle into 40 days of bloody combat resulting in the death of 7000 American soldiers and 20,000 Japanese.  Sagio fights  only because he has to, and because of his personal friendship with the General, who personally saves Sagio three times.

I left the theater thinking, what does one learn after seeing this film? That war is hell? That in war everybody involved is on the right side? I think there's something about "honor" that just doesn't sit right with me. In the Middle East the suicide bombers are blowing themselves  and innocent people up to uphold the "honor "of their religion. How is inflicting horrible death and injury honorable? It's not! it's insane! It's evil!  Those who want to control us  have hijacked the word "honor" to make us do their bidding. 

The dialogue in Letters from Iwo Jima is  almost totally in Japanese with English subtitles. The music score by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens , orchestrated and conducted by Lennie Niehaus is subtle and magnificent.