POISON SCOOTER

Flags of Our Fathers

Clint Eastwood is a very talented man. A writer, a musician, a director, an actor; accomplished at the highest levels at many of these skills. After seeing Flags I suggest we add historian to the list.

Now like a history book, some parts are boring and some are kind of cool, but unlike a book the juicy parts are visual and moving images convey a better sense of what went on than a book in my humble opinion. My knowledge of what took place on Iwo Jima during WWII was limited, so I got a better sense of the sacrifice of our troops, the tenacity of the Japanese and the terrain's pitfalls.

The tone of the movie differs from Speilberg's Saving Private Ryan and that may be intentional by Eastwood. You almost get the sense that he is not only telling a story of faceless and nameless heroes, but that he is somehow trying to point out how horrific war in general. It's as if it's an anti-war movie wrapped up in a war movie costume. The soldiers are treated as expendable, both during the battle and after the war is ended. Racism was touched on slightly with African Americans, but more with Native Americans due to the fact that one of the flag raisers on Iwo Jima was Ira "Chief" Hayes portrayed by the superb Adam Beach. And it is in the story of the men who are just one of many who sacrificed so much to end this war that you can see Eastwood's message.

The flaw I found in the film had to do with the character development of the main characters. Both Ryan Phillippe and Jesse Bradford are slightly wooden as actors in this picture and I needed more depth from them to care about the men thay portayed. The war sequences were fantastic, although not as graphic as recent movies of World War II. Clint perhaps spread himself too thin making two movies about the war in one year, scoring the films and doing it all while approaching 80. Or perhaps when viewed as one half of a whole, I need to see Letters to Iwo Jima first to truly figure it out, the movie will have more resonance.

posted by Scooter @ 7:32 AM