By Bassam Tarazi | Image property of respective holders.
Flags of Our Fathers
There’s a point when watching this movie that I actually got annoyed. Perhaps it was my colossal expectations but all I know is that I got frustrated with how the story was being told. Flags of Our Fathers spares nothing in the sense of showing us what war, and more definitively what war on Japanese soil, must have been like.
DVD Review: Flags of Our Fathers
But the story is much more than a war story. Eastwood takes us on a journey of the men who actually raised the second flag on Iwo Jima in “that” photo. We learn what morale and images can do to a country at the expense of ordinary men, ordinary soldiers. It’s hard to knock any film about the men that fought in World War II but when I compare this film to say, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, I feel that “Ryan” blows it away.
Maybe it was the performance by Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach that left me a little dissatisfied (I thought Phillippe played his part the best) but I imagine that Eastwood wanted faces that you had never seen so you could visualize these soldiers for what they were before that photo was snapped, average kids just doing the job that was asked of them.
The film does do an excellent job in portraying the prices of war that the public doesn’t see after the bullets stop flying. The soldiers’ memories, remorse, and inner demons and for that alone it is a film that is worth seeing. But let’s not forget that war has two sides. Do yourself a favor and see Letters from Iwo Jima as well.
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