Letters from Iwo Jima - an (non)attempt at a review

I saw Letters from Iwo Jima recently and figured I should write down my thoughts on it. I had earlier seen it's companion movie - Flags of our fathers, and hadn't been quiet impressed. Letters, on the other hand, was one of the better movies I have seen recently.

It's the story of the Japanese soldiers who fought to "defend" the island of Iwo Jima from the American invaders. The main protagonists - General Kuribayashi and Saigo were shown as affable men, those who were empathetic to their fellow man, yet knew what they had to do (a misguided sense of duty in my opinion, but sense of duty nonetheless). The movie is interspersed with scenes showing their humanity, their sense of humor, their sense of right and wrong, their longing to go back home, their courage in the face of inevitable defeat and death. We got to learn what General K thought about his visit to the US, how Saigo was forced into going to war, how his wife reacted when they got the letter asking him to go to war, his kind loving words and resolute promise to his unborn baby that night. All these scenes added up to give the viewer a sense of what those times were like, how tough they were for both the sides (we have, after all, seen more than a couple movies telling the American side of the story) and how similar the various people involved were, in their feelings towards the war (I had got a taste of this in Memoirs of a Geisha too).

It was a movie that told it's story like it happened - no sugar coating, nobody was a hero, nobody was a villain. Some of the scenes where the Japanese helped an American soldier with his wounds, or where the American soldiers shot their Japanese captors were quiet endearing. By the end of things, I was left with swelled up eyes and a knot in my stomach which was saying that such things should never happen - nobody deserves death this way, nobody deserves to live life after having done the things a war makes you do.

And that, in my opinion, was the highlight of the movie - an urge to resolve to not let such things happen again - and the director through the tragic story of these men, implores us to follow up on this urge.