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It’s when the characters start to die that the movie comes alive. The groupings are stiff, the dialogue (in Japanese) expository, and there’s little in the way of context: no mention of why the Japanese joined the war, no hint of the atrocities they routinely committed against their demonized foes, and no attempt to dig into the myth of the heroic Japanese warrior-which is more potent than its American counterpart. In the first hour, before the carnage began, I wondered if he had any point of view at all on what he was shooting. His style is simpler here-more distanced, more stoic. His Iwo Jima films are not thematically linked (different sources, different screenwriters), and Eastwood doesn’t frame the Japanese as archetypally as he did Our Boys.
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Too old for another Dirty Harry movie, Eastwood embraced the role of brooding, fatalistic American Master-and, I’m bound to say, is finally beginning to wear it more convincingly. He could cut costs by shooting both pictures simultaneously (he is famously parsimonious), and he could continue the process of revising his legend that began with Unforgiven, after which Hollywood hailed this symbol of reactionary, cartoon-nihilist vigilantism as a classical storyteller with (who’d-a-thunk it?) an abhorrence of violence. The project must have appealed to Eastwood on two levels. Suribachi, from which the Japanese mowed down seven thousand members of the Greatest Generation, Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima is his Flags of Our Fathers turned inside out, which means that now we see the battle through the eyes of Japanese soldiers (faceless in Flags) who knew they’d die but kept on fighting anyway so as not to disgrace their mother country.