And to be honest I'm a little tired of World War II. I realize it was probably the biggest thing to happen worldwide since the creation of the film medium but...more Little Miss Sunshine's less Schindler's List/Pearl Harbor/Saving Private Ryan's/etc.
That said, Letters from Iwo Jima is an AMAZING movie and a serious contendor for the Best Picture Oscar this year (although I haven't seen Babel and The Departed yet).
Visually we're told all we need to know in the first 60 seconds. Everything is bleak, desaturated, and desolate. Except for the browns and olives of uniforms and the ocassional foliage, the only color we see is the ocasional shot of the blue sky. Which is normally a washed out white, or not visible at all as so much of the movie takes place in caves. As the story evolves so do the visuals. The last hour is spent virtually on a moonscape, where there's nothing familiar or living but these soldiers who are trapped in this strange land. There's also a great use of shadow which means that same last hour of the movie is spent with at least a third of the screen in pitch blackness.
It's a movie about symbols. Which seems to be the theme in common with it's companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers, which I haven't seen yet. The characters are forced to defend this desolate wasteland where even the water is poison because an unseen/uncontrolable power (the Emperor) demands it. And because of their perception of honor, they die. I don't know enough history to know the importance of Iwo Jima from a strategic stand point. Toward the end of the movie there was discussion about how if Iwo Jima fell, Japan would fall and it seemed to imply that was because of the proximity to the Japanese islands. But even establishing that, this group of humans is defending a piece of shit land because another group of humans want the piece of shit land because in the grand scheme of things it MEANS something.
When I took Chinese Film at Evergreen we often discussed how so many Chinese films took place pre-communist revolution to comment on life post-communist revolution without being censored. Film is a visual metaphor, and the use of allagory is alive and well. So many movies coming out now address the terror of a military regime where people die at the whim of a madman for a grand cause that ultimately is ridiculous/worthless. And I'm as heart sick about it as I'm just plain tired of it. Much like the AIDS epidemic, it's something that's constantly there which causes endless suffer, and I'm goddamned sick of it. But it's not something that can be ignored.
I'm all over the board right now but the point is, this movie, like every good movie, establishes universal truths. The fact that it's entirely in Japanese emphasizes that rather than alienates English speaking audiences. It shows that with all the differences, we're all the same. We're all tired of fighting. We all have mothers who worry about us. And we all try to do what's right because it is right.
Why is that so hard to understand?
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