Clint Eastwood Iwo Jima
Clint Eastwood Letters From Iwo Jima Flags Of Our Fathers
Directed by Clint Eastwood. With Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase. The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.
Letters From Iwo Jima Movie
Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) Letters from Iwo Jima is the highest movie on this list that Clint doesn't star in. It tells the story of The Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers - and is far superior to Flags of Our Fathers, Clint's other World War Two movie released a couple of months earlier. It's spoken almost entirely in Japanese. Ken Watanabe stars as Tadamichi Kuribayashi - a General who didn't believe any of the Propaganda that was coming from his country's leaders.
The movie asserts that,while the Japanese leaders were indeed 'the bad guys', the soldiers and the civilians were most certainly not. Obviously some, perhaps most characters did believe the Propaganda - they truly did believe that the Americans attacking them were sub-human and that they deserved no kind of sympathy or mercy. The main criticism of this film by some is that 'Only those Japanese characters that had known Americans before the war show mercy.' The thing is, these people seem to think that the message is 'If you talk to Americans enough you'll eventually become more civilised,' - I see it very differently. Of course Propaganda is going to have a different effect on people who have never left Japan and never seen an American compared to somebody who knows exactly what they're like and therefore will instantly know that the Propaganda is false. Think of how many Americans probably watch movies showing the other side of the conflict believing that the Japanese soldiers were savages.