What are we searching for, as we sift through the remnants? It seems as though Eastwood himself doesn’t even know yet. It’s a literal excavation: at the opening, present-day archeologists are digging through the remains of Japanese WWII soldiers in the caves on the island of Iwo Jima. Rather than an intellectualized discernment of the creation and falsehood of the American hero, Letters goes for a fully, almost purely sensory delving, an uncovering of the Imperial Army’s self-delusional tactics, blinding patriotism, and most importantly, individualized grief, as its dream was coming to a close. Flags seems atonal in comparison, but not a “noble failure,” as many had condescended in retrospect, Flags of Our Fathers’ wholly roundabout approach to the American boys’ subjective experience on the shores of Iwo Jima, filtered as it is through a critique of American media consumption and wartime image-making, seems like a purposely dispassionate warm-up for Letters from Iwo Jima’s thoroughly immersive experience. The amount of dedication and historical and humanist fascination that has gone into creating Letters from Iwo Jima reveals not only where the filmmaker’s sentiments lie but also that the fragmentary nature of Flags of Our Fathers was perhaps a necessity Eastwood had to work his way through. What Eastwood has accomplished here is not as simple as “capturing the other side’s point of view” or creating the “Japanese counterpoint” to his earlier 2006 Iwo Jima film, Flags of Our Fathers, either of which would infer some sort of gimmickry. Literally digging their own graves, the Imperial Army soldiers witnessed in Clint Eastwood’s elegiac Letters from Iwo Jima, bring new meaning to the term “walking dead.” Even more so than Kon Ichikawa’s benchmark Fires on the Plain, the 1959 zombified slog through the ghastly remains of Japanese soldiers who both perpetrated and were touched by the horrors of WWII, Letters feels like the first war film entirely populated by ghosts.

Letters from iwo jima 2006 movie