Though Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knows he and his men have virtually no chance of survival, he uses his extraordinary military skills to hold off American troops as long as possible during the Second World War.
Indirectly but cogently comment on our experiences of other movies. Having Japanese soldiers as heroes allows us to reconsider the didacticism we've been handed in the past.
War is hell, always has been, and movies will continue to confirm it for anyone who might doubt. In this case, though, Letters only shows that for all the different perspective the other side of a war could have, it's the same old movie clichés.
Modern-day echoes of being snookered into a bad war aren't lost on Clint Eastwood, and "Letters from Iwo Jima" delivers an overwhelmingly powerful eulogy for the death of righteousness in combat on either side of the line.
Where Flags heaved its characters through war and psychic trauma without first allowing us all to get acquainted, Letters takes such care with its protagonists that they awaken and descend from the screen.
Eastwood is a master of the extended look (this comes from the two directors he acknowledges as his own masters, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel), the look that stretches time and that is blinded by what it sees.
The proper way to appreciate Letters and Flags is to treat them as complimentary halves of the same epic movie, a Godfather war epic. One half is plainly more ambitious than the other, but both have virtues that distinguish them.
Miami Herald
January 19, 2007
By placing us on the opposite side of the battlefield, the movie forces us to approach it from a fresh perspective. The technique also lends Letters an uncommon timelessness.
ReelTalk Movie Reviews
October 23, 2009
Not an anti-war tract or a glorification but, rather, a fair consideration of humanity that exists within the inhumanity of armed conflict.
An even more sombre affair, as beautifully restrained as the earlier film but also, despite its scenes of battle, death, suicide and suffering, shockingly intimate.
