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Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, both directed by Clint Eastwood, are companion pictures - filmed just a couple of months apart - about the battle for Iwo Jima island in the second World War.  Flags of Our Fathers tells the story from the American perspective, while Letters from Iwo Jima tells the story of the battle from the perspective of the Japanese. 

For those rare few not aware of Iwo Jima's significance, it was the last stop before Tokyo.

 For Americans, control of  the island was necessary as a staging area for the mainland invasion of Japan.  For the Japanese, it was a do or die effort to stop an invasion of their homeland.  It was also an enormously gruesome and violent struggle as American invaders rushed the beaches of an island fortified with a dug-in and well fortified Japanese force; the Americans would ultimately lose 6,000 men in the battle, the Japanese 20,000.  The island itself was tiny, a desolate vocanic island devoid of any animal or plant life, entirely flat except for Mount Suribachi at one end of the island.  And it was at the summit of Mount Suribachi, with the advantage of height looking down at the beach, that the Japanese had spent months creating an intricate network of tunnels and pill boxes, from which they attacked the American forces with machine guns and heavy canons.  

Flags of Our Fathers starts with the Marine amphibious invasion, as thousands of Marines rushed the beach, only to be met by heavy machine gun fire.

 The Marines are shown struggling for every inch of land, the dead falling all about them.  And then, Flags of Our Fathers cuts to the homefront, where two Marines and a Naval corpman are selling war bonds.  These three men were discovered to  have been in the famous photo of the flag raising over Iwo Jima and were brought back home to participate in some well meaning and necessary propaganda.  Periodically, the men have flashbacks to the Battle of Iwo Jima, as the film slowly builds towards the climatic flag raising.  Except that the flag raising was, as it turns out, not that climatic, after all.  There were multiple flag raisings, and the photo captures the second flag.  And there's confusion over who was in the photo and perhaps not all the men being paraded as the infamous flag wavers were actually there. 

Letters From Iwo Jima starts months or weeks before the American invasion with the arrival of a Japanese general charged with commanding the island's defenses.  He is dissatisfied with the planning that has occurred in his absence and moves quickly about the island, entirely changing the island's defense plan, much to the consternation of the officers under him.  The film focuses on a single Japanese soldier, Private First Class Saigo, who doesn't quite believe the myths of patriotism and the need to die for the Empreror.  He just wants to return to his wife in one piece and would be quite happy to just hand the island over to the Americans.  Letters From Iwo Jima uses many of the same shots of the massive Naval fleet and the American invasion as were already filmed for Flags of Our Father. 

Both films are ambitious.  Flags of Our Father wants to be about the power of images, and how a single photograph, which was interpreted by the American public as an image of victory, became more important than the truth.  Letters From Iwo Jima wants to show a human side to the Japanese invasion.

This dual film project also works because the sum of the two pictures is greater than the individual films.  As viewers, we see that both sides are worried and fearful about their enemy.  We also see, quite interestingly, that both armies were struggling with resources.  The Japanese commanders were outraged that many of their planes had been diverted back to Tokyo to protect the mainland.  The Americans commanders were outraged that the Air Force was only able to give them two days of aerial bombardment before the invasion instead of six, the number originally planned for.  The idea of resources, and the lack thereof, and resources actually winning a war, is a concept I wish both films had taken further.

Unfortunately, I didn't care much for either film.  Letters From Iwo Jima,  was roundly praised by American criticis and of which, I seem to be the lone dissenting opinion.  First, of all both films are lacking in any characters that I could care about.  Flags of Our Fathers features three men at its center, but each man is only given a "type."  The Native American Marine is earnest and honest and struggles with alcohol - that's literally the extent of what we know about him.  The naval corpsman (Ryan Phillipe) is calm and thoughtful - again, this is all that we know about him.  As such, our emotional involvement is limited.  The battle scenes are good, but not as good as those we've already seen in Saving Private Ryan.  Also, the constant time trickery in Flags of Our Fathers gets grating - right when you're about to get involved in a scene, Eastwood changes time, moving it back to the present day where the old man is telling a story, or to the battlefield, or to after the battle selling war bonds.  It gets dizzy.  And there appears to be no benefit to the time shuffle.  It's just a trick that's done because it gives the appearance of thoughtfulness without actually adding anything of substance to the film.

Letters From Iwo Jima suffered, primarily, from too small a budget.  There were supposed to be thousands of men on that island, but the film never shows us more than twenty at a time.  The caves they are in seem like obvious sets of the sort you'd find on a Star Trek episode.  And the main character isn't easy to relate to.

Two ambitious films with a lot of interesting ideas, unfortunately undone by a less than perfect execution.