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[rating:3.5/5]

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Ken Watanabe

Clint Eastwood who is know to reinvent many formula based American films into something so much more intimate. This movie is one of his finer examples. The character introductions are by the letters they write to their families. This reduces the movie from its epic status to something more touching. The soldiers in this war film are not going to walk into the valley of victory but instead loose their lives for defeat. It makes you feel a little out of place.

The story about a general who leads his men to defeat. This leaves them to die for their honour by even killing by their own hands. This is a tale of hopelessness it brings into no solace. The phantom of death creeps on these men at various stages in the film. But our these people who kill themeselves when all hope is lost make them heroes. They redifine the word hero itself. Heroes with honour is what these men believe in and die for. There are moments when some of the men are confronted by the Americans who are not sure or quite understand the existence of these people.

The understanding with which Clint Eastwood takes this story bringing out the pathos and the struggle which comes with war is nothing but divine. The perfomances by the actors, especially Ken Watnabe who infuses an amazing restraint and unsentimental dignity takes the movie to the depths of human eventualities. This movie also brings to light the fact that man has reached a stage that there are too many things which are necessary for their existence. One of them is war the mother of it all. The mother which takes but never restores. There is no doubt in my mind when i say that this is the greatest the war films of all time.

Historians estimate that 20,000 Japanese infantrymen defended Iwo Jima; 1,083 of them survived. (The Americans sent 77,000 Marines and nearly 100,000 total troops, of whom close to 7,000 died and almost 20,000 were wounded.) The Japanese commander was Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, whose illustrated letters to his wife and children, recently unearthed on the island, were a source for Iris Yamashita’s script. New York times reference.