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Spilt popcorn - To the letter
– By SGT Damian Griffin
Volume 50, No.4, March 22, 2007
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| Worth writing home about:
Imperial Japanese Army General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe)
faces the inevitable in Letters from Iwo Jima. |
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Letters from Iwo Jima
Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido
Nakamura
4/5 stars
This is the much anticipated couplet to director Clint Eastwood’s
other recent success, Flags of our fathers, which was shot on location
in Iwo Jima.
Amazingly, both that and this film Letters from Iwo Jima were filmed simultaneously,
but only one cast member appears in both films. That is Chuck Lindberg
(Allasandro Maestrobuono), who can be seen in Letters from Iwo Jima igniting
Japanese bunker systems with a flame thrower.
Shot in Japanese with English sub-titles, this film is the battle from
the Japanese perspective. The early part shows real footage of what’s
left of Japanese defensive positions – rusted machine guns still
mounted and pointing out to sea, broken-down US tanks still in their approaches
to Mount Suribachi.
This pans to a group of Japanese archeologists finding a buried canvas
bag full of letters as they explore the still-intact command centre of
Imperial Japanese Army General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe). This
takes us back to 1944 and to the arrival of Gen Kuribayashi to the Island.
On arrival he finds that friction exists between the Japanese Naval commander
and his subordinate Army commander.
Gen Kuribayashi quickly moves to resolve this and to coordinate and reshape
the vastly insufficient defences on the island for what he soon realises
will be Japan’s heroic last stand.
As the months progress, news arrives of Japan’s imminent defeat as
Gen Kuribayashi’s requests for support are denied. Knowing the situation
is dire, his troops continue to dig tunnel systems throughout the island,
and especially on Mount Suribachi.
These tunnels prove enough to shield the vastly inferior force from the
massive naval bombardment that the US fleet delivers as it sits offshore
in preparation to deploy more than 20,000 invasion troops.
Throughout the film, the story of the Japanese preparing to be invaded
cuts away to the lives of two characters, Gen Kuribayashi and an unlikely
private soldier Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), as they write letters home
to their families. Amazingly, Gen Kuribayashi’s letters are extracts
from the actual letters he sent to his family while on Iwo Jima.
Gen Kuribayashi and Pte Saigo’s lives seem to be linked as the tenacious
Japanese fight to the last man and the last bullet.
The quality of their struggle seems the most important thing to Gen Kuribayashi
and his troops, as they know all along defeat is inevitable.
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