I had great expectations for this movie. I dutifully watched "Flags of our Fathers" and was disappointed with that movie, and the ensuing hype was that Letters from Iwo Jima was way better. Its not. Its better, but not hugely so.
I think the problem is Eastwood's directing style. By all accounts, he is not a director who gets fancy. He sets up the shot, does a couple of takes and thats it. Movie made, on time and on budget.
Trouble is, that works if your story involves boxers or cowboys or people in a normal setting where you don't need to dislodge the viewers expectations and sense of reality. Not so good when dealing with the surreal situations that battles and wars create.
His crews and actors all love Eastwood the director, at least according to a recent biography I watched on him, and thats great, but sometimes you need a psycho jerk director to get the right movie made.
So the genius that can produce that feeling, as done by Spielberg in Private Ryan, Coppola in Apocalypse Now, Kubrick in Paths to Glory and Full Metal Jacket, Cimono in Deerhunter or even Malick in the Thin Red Line is absent here and so is that necessary element of horror and dreamlike shock.
War movies are either action flicks, epics, moral dramas or occasionally comedies. This isn't really the first second or fourth, which means its a moral drama, but for that to work, you have to be engaged in the film and for some reason, that never happened for me.
To be honest, eventually, during my watching, I found this film to be tedious. I got tired of reading subtitles, which detract from the experience of watching the movie, whats more, some of the English translations offered seemed lame and even occasionally silly.
The other thing the film lacked, and maybe it was intentional, was a sense of the surrounding circumstances that gave rise to the battle for Iwo Jima. There are passing references in the conversations to the Japanese circumstances of the time (the war was lost and they knew it), but the film fails to frame that well.
Now, all of that being said, because everyone else seems to think this film really rocks, and because I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood, I'm going to try and watch it again, just to make sure I didn't miss something.
I think the problem is Eastwood's directing style. By all accounts, he is not a director who gets fancy. He sets up the shot, does a couple of takes and thats it. Movie made, on time and on budget.
Trouble is, that works if your story involves boxers or cowboys or people in a normal setting where you don't need to dislodge the viewers expectations and sense of reality. Not so good when dealing with the surreal situations that battles and wars create.
His crews and actors all love Eastwood the director, at least according to a recent biography I watched on him, and thats great, but sometimes you need a psycho jerk director to get the right movie made.
So the genius that can produce that feeling, as done by Spielberg in Private Ryan, Coppola in Apocalypse Now, Kubrick in Paths to Glory and Full Metal Jacket, Cimono in Deerhunter or even Malick in the Thin Red Line is absent here and so is that necessary element of horror and dreamlike shock.
War movies are either action flicks, epics, moral dramas or occasionally comedies. This isn't really the first second or fourth, which means its a moral drama, but for that to work, you have to be engaged in the film and for some reason, that never happened for me.
To be honest, eventually, during my watching, I found this film to be tedious. I got tired of reading subtitles, which detract from the experience of watching the movie, whats more, some of the English translations offered seemed lame and even occasionally silly.
The other thing the film lacked, and maybe it was intentional, was a sense of the surrounding circumstances that gave rise to the battle for Iwo Jima. There are passing references in the conversations to the Japanese circumstances of the time (the war was lost and they knew it), but the film fails to frame that well.
Now, all of that being said, because everyone else seems to think this film really rocks, and because I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood, I'm going to try and watch it again, just to make sure I didn't miss something.