This Clint Eastwood war film is one of the most faithful ever made on the subject

Between February and March 1945, the United States launched a large-scale naval, land and air attack against the island of Iwo Jima, occupied by 22,000 Japanese fighters. It was the only land battle in the Pacific War where the United States saw more of its soldiers knocked out of action than its Japanese. They had 25,000 losses including 6,821 deaths. On the Japanese side, the toll was absolutely appalling: only 1,083 survivors remained out of the 22,000 defenders of the island…

This terrible battle, one of the most famous of this war, documented by color archive images, is also at the heart of Letters from Iwo Jima. Released in 2006 and directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Iris Yamashita, Paul Haggis and Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the film relates the events from the Japanese point of view of the facts.

More particularly that of the Japanese commander in chief in charge of organizing the island’s defenses, played by an extraordinary and admirable Ken Watanabe. The work was conceived as the second part of a diptych; the first being Memoirs of our fathers, which adopted the American point of view.

“You can really get a good idea of ​​what this battle was like from both perspectives”

In a very interesting video interview, published by Insidera historian, John McManus, deciphers and analyzes scenes from war films, awarding a final grade to the work. He thus gives a very solid 9 out of 10 to Eastwood’s film, which is also among the best in his filmography.

For him, the film depicts with great precision elements of the battle, in particular the vast system of Japanese tunnels on the island (which was no less than 27 km!), the weapons and the fortifications built by the troops of the Empire of the Rising Sun.

But what makes the great strength of Letters from Iwo Jima according to him is precisely that it was conceived as a diptych. “What makes Memoirs of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima a little bit special is that I don’t know of any other circumstance with a film that sort of depicts both sides in two different films, that has this kind of piece complementary in which […] you can really get a good sense of what that battle was like from both perspectives.”

Both films were unfortunately not box office successes. Memory of Our Fathers only grossed $65 million. Letters from Iwo Jima performed a little better, with $68 million. The fact remains that this diptych, on such a subject, is an extremely rare example in Hollywood cinema.

Of great emotional power, Letters from Iwo Jima is an immense war film, perched high in the heights of the genre. Which we carefully place alongside another war film adopting the Japanese point of view of the facts, but this time signed by a Japanese filmmaker: the extraordinary and terrible Fires on the Plain by Kon Ichikawa, which relates the ordeal of the last Japanese soldiers, caught between Filipino guerrillas and American troops.

Want to see or rewatch the film? It is available on Warner’s new MAX platform.