Flags of Our Fathers / Letters from Iwo Jima
I finally gave in and purchased the Flags of Our Fathers / Letters from Iwo Jima DVD set (for cheap). Having finished both, I found the latter to be the far greater film. While Flags represented the politics necessary to run a war, Letters takes us a completely different way, showing us more of the human condition – and of the enemy1 no less.
In war movies, humanity is everything. What is there to make sense of without it? We need to see how it affects the persons involved. Otherwise it is merely a mindless Michael Bay summer action flick. Letters gives us humanity by the truckload – in fact, it never wavers from telling us about it. Thankfully, it also never dips into sentimentality or melodrama. This is where Clint Eastwood’s filmmaking shines – telling us the story with the skill of a historian. He leaves it to us to extract what emotion and morality we can from the film.
That is not to say that Flags isn’t good. It has its moment of humanity, but its best asset is in drawing out a moral dilemma that is quite ambiguous. That the flag-raising moment itself captured in that timeless photograph is in fact a trite task compared to the actual first raising of the flag, where history was indeed made but was not captured on camera – is it wrong to set point out the truth at the expense of the loss of hope and all that it entails? Flags is good, it’s just that, after seeing Letters, those (post-war) concerns of the characters in Flags seem mundane compared the the in-actual-battle experiences of the Iwo Jima soldiers.
It is, of course, not fair to compare the two as each tells us different things – moreso because they compliment each other. Combined, they suggest the absurdity of war on both levels of personal (Japanese side) and societal (American side). And Letters from Iwo Jima, anchored by Flags of Our Fathers, is easily one of the best antiwar movies ever made.
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1 I only use “enemy” to point out the Japanese because really, when was the last time you have seen a WWII movie about the Japanese, or Germans? And compare that to the hundreds of them in the Allies’ point of view.