No-one, least of all themselves, expects to get out of there alive, and the film's main impetus is to study the differing profiles of each soldier - be they decorated hero or reluctant draftee dragged away from home, and in Saigo's case, from a pregnant wife. All they have to do is hold the yanks back for as long as they can.
Ito (a fiercely belligerent Shido Nakamura) - settle down to await the formidable American fleet. Digging foxholes and gun emplacements and carving a labyrinth beneath the black-caked hills, the beleaguered troops - amongst them conscripted baker Saigo (the wonderful Kazunari Ninomiya), ex-military policeman Shimizu (Ryo Kase), former Olympic medal-winner Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) and hard-line lunatic Lt. The very film seems to give off a poisonous fume, and scenes of Ken Watanabe's Kuribayashi wandering across the ashen slopes make the location appear distressingly alien. Shooting the movie in Japanese and bleaching his film stock until the finished print looks almost black and white, Eastwood maximises on atmosphere by adhering to the hellish conditions that the Japanese lived, fought and died under. It was a gamble that paid off, with critical acclaim for both films and even awards for Letters From Iwo Jima, which is, unquestionably, the superior treatment of the two. the two films sort of an Iwo Jima through the Looking Glass. Realising that he had untapped a distinctively new and unique slant on the same material, he couldn't resist committing this mirror-image story to the screen as well. General Kuribayashi in letters he was not lucky enough to have sent home - they were found during excavations of the site many years later. Eastwood was already totally invested in making his more commercial, more standardised account of the conflict when his own personal interest in the saga found him taking onboard the personal account of it as written down by courageous Japanese Lt. It is a bold undertaking from one of the most acclaimed actors-turned-directors around today and, to my knowledge anyway, the first time that anyone has told such a story from the two opposing sides' points of view. Shot back to back with the US propaganda de-mystifyer, Flags Of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima takes us deep into the trenches, foxholes and tunnels of the determined Japanese army, and even deeper into the psyche of soldiers who knew they were doomed before the American fleet had even swept into view.
Hanako, am I didgging my own grave?”Įxpected to last for no more than five days, the poorly-provisioned Japanese defenders of the sulphuric, inhospitable chunk of volcanic rock in the South Pacific, called Iwo Jima, and their acceptance or denial of an assured honourable death in the face of an overwhelming American invasion force, form the emotional core of Clint Eastwood's second production covering the same, tide-turning battle of World War II. This is the hole that we will fight and die in.