Letters from Iwo Jima (7 out of 10)

I am feeling tired right now, so this won't be the greatest of reviews, but I want to get it typed out.

Letters from Iwo Jima is the second part of Clint Eastwoods' Iwo Jima duology, this one told from the Japanese perspective. (Flags of Our Fathers being the American one). It tells the story of three soldiers on Iwo Jima, a general (played by Ken Watanabe) and two infantrymen.

The characters are pretty much cookie cutter archetypes. The general is the guy with radical tactics that nobody else likes, and therefore he himself is not liked. One of the soldiers, Saigo, hates being in the war, and just wants to go home and be with his wife. The other soldier is believed by everybody to be a spy. Really, Letters from Iwo Jima is not entirely different than any other American war movie. Of course, it is greatly different because of the issues in the movie, such as all the ritual suicide, and the fighting to the death stuff that only the Imperial Japanese subscribed to. Still, the characters and the way they acted was very derivative of American war movies, and I'm not sure if this was on purpose or not.

LFIJ tells each characters' story wonderfully, past and present. The way in which each character interacted with one another and the way the plot progressed during the battle was my favorite part. Even though I didn't feel like this movie was entirely original, I was still captivated by the story and it's characters.

I'm not sure if there was meant to be any sort of bias in the movie. The Japanese look somewhat insane at times with their harikiri, and killing off soldiers that disobey. It is no wonder they lost the war if they commit suicide every time something doesn't go their way.

So yeah, I really thought about this movie. In retrospect, I don't really like Bobby as much as I thought I did. I wanted to make sure I didn't do the same here. But it was a well-directed film with great cinematography and colors, and while you aren't missing much if you don't see this movie, because you have seen nearly all of it's elements in other war movies, it is still interesting to see this sort of movie from the Japanese side. The characters and story helped a great deal as well to make this a very interesting movie.

But after seeing it, I don't think it as deserving as Babel/Departed for Best Picture or Scorsese for Best Director... I don't even really think it's worthy of a Best Picture Nomination, but I'm not in charge of that.