Sixty-one years ago, US and Japanese armies met on Iwo Jima. Decades later, several hundred letters are unearthed from that stark island’s soil. The letters give faces and voices to the men who fought there, as well as the extraordinary general who led them.The Japanese soldiers are sent to Iwo Jima knowing that in all probability they will not come back. Among them are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who wants only to live to see the face of his newborn daughter; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian champion known around the world for his skill and his honor; Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a young former military policeman whose idealism has not yet been tested by war; and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), a strict military man who would rather accept suicide than surrender.

Leading the defense is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), whose travels in America have revealed to him the hopeless nature of the war but also given him strategic insight into how to take on the vast American armada streaming in from across the Pacific. With little defense other than sheer will and the volcanic rock of the island itself, Gen. Kuribayashi’s unprecedented tactics transform what was predicted to be a quick and bloody defeat into nearly 40 days of heroic and resourceful combat.

The ironic thing is that Flags of Our Fathers was heralded and set out as a front runner for the Oscar campaign and Letters from Iwo Jima was to be the companion piece the piece that gave the other sides point of view and interesting and ambitious test by an acclaimed director. But then Flags bombed while being met with a good amount of critical disdain and quickly disappeared from the Cineplex’s of the world. The problem with Flags was the acting and fractured storyline, it was hard to care about these characters when the movie jumped from one to the next so quickly you are almost lost in a blur of bad performances that never really do anything to make you feel their plights. But Letter from Iwo Jima is more simple, lest complex and while there is still a number of stories to be told, you find yourself feeling and sympathizing for them where you did not do the same for their American counterparts.

These are truly honorable men fighting in a war they don’t entirely believe but duty, loyalty to country and the desire to protect their own families and to give them one more day of life in war that is a lost cause by this time makes you cheer and root for them even though they were the enemy. They were not so different than our boys who found themselves thousands of miles away from home fighting and suffering for a cause they were beginning to loose faith in. But the Japanese in the film do it with a little more honor, a little more heartache and the actors turn in much more profound and winning performances. So what was supposed to be the companion piece to an Oscar nominated film ends up being the Oscar nominated film that captures you a lot more profoundly and emotionally as you get a chance to glimpse behind the eyes of the enemy.

Clint Eastwood was a fine actor but he has proven that he is an even better director. Maybe all those years toiling away as an actor gave him insights into what makes a film really good and he has been able to master that in his directing skills. He mixes a masterful blend of drama, action and story into a film that is about one battle in war of many battles. He manages to give you the prospective of what was an enemy at the time and see them as family men and soldiers who are fighting despite losing and who didn’t entirely believe in the cause to begin with. The film does bog down near the end a little as the battle and the siege wage on and you wait for the final outcome but the movie is the far superior film than it American counterpart.

Many of the actors except Ken Watanabe, who’s turn in the Last Samurai showed us his acting chops, are new to American audiences as Eastwood used Japanese actors to fill out the cast. Its sometimes hard to judge acting when the actors are not speaking your native tongue but it is quite clear that the cast are very skillful in their acting as they draw you in and make you feel for their losing cause. But it is Ken Watanabe who steals the show like he did in the Last Samurai with his powerful performance as he breaks away from tradition in an effort to give his family one more day of freedom before the invasion of Tokyo itself begins. The movie has its flaws as it does drag a little in the end but it is still a masterful film that is much better than its companion piece instead of the other way around.

Grade: B+