The point of Letters From Iwo Jima is a little obvious. It tells us that the Japanese were human beings too. Well, I’m sure any intelligent individual would have already known that. But does the film tell us anything more than this? I’m not sure that it does. Therefore I can’t add myself to the list of people who hail Letters From Iwo Jima as a masterpiece. In fact, I think Flags of Our Fathers may well be the better film. It at least attempted to try and do something different with the traditional war flick. It tried to open it up and show some sort of historical perspective. And although Letters From Iwo Jima does this to a certain extent, it didn’t do it enough for my liking.

In Letters From Iwo Jima Eastwood seems so burdened by his desire to show the Japanese as human beings that the film often feels manipulative. For instance, there’s a scene where two Japanese soldiers, tired of fighting, decide to surrender to the Americans. The very second that the prisoners were left alone with two Yanks I knew what was going to happen. But despite that, I kept on saying to myself, ‘Don’t shoot them’. But of course, the Americans do indeed shoot the Japanese soldiers. You can hear the film shouting at you: ‘Look, we did bad things too! We’re as bad as each other!’ But although the Allies did indeed do terrible things, the film doesn’t really show the other side of the coin. We see some of the Japanese officers mistreating their soldiers, but we don’t see any of the terrible things that were done to American troops – the only piece of up close violence is when some Japanese soldiers repeatedly bayonet an American, and that’s mainly out of surprise and fear, which is perfectly understandable in a combat situation.

However, unlike some people, I didn’t find it particularly dubious that a couple of the ‘good’ Japanese characters had some sort of connection to America - The General and Baron Nishi both have spent time there. I think the point the film is trying to make here is that these individuals have the experience to know that the Americans are people just like them, that the government is lying is when it makes them out to be monsters and cowards. Therefore the ordinary person, who doesn’t have the life experience of these characters and who is constantly bombarded by propaganda, believes the lies that are spat out. But the scene where an American soldier is captured by Baron Nishi and we find out that he isn’t the scum the Japanese government has made him out to be fell a little flat for me. Again it felt a little laboured. I’m just not sure that it would be so easy for a large group of people to deprogram years of bullshit and lies.

And it disappointed me that the film didn’t investigate the motivations of the Japanese in any depth. We see that the ordinary man was forced into combat – there’s a good scene where the film’s main character, a baker, is forced to look pleased when he’s called up for duty – but the motivations of the government itself are left unsaid. As a consequence you don’t fully understand the crap the Japanese were fed. And I think it would be a lot easier to sympathise with the characters if we were given a fuller picture – the snippets that we’re given, like the baker being called up and the soldier who’s forced to kill a woman’s dog by a superior, help somewhat, but the ‘bad’ characters remain screaming stereotypes. What was their motivation?

What works well, though, is the portrayal of the misery the Japanese soldiers had to go through. Living in caves like animals, they certainly didn’t have an easy time of it. And then having hardly any ammunition, little water and virtually no food you wonder how they had the will to fight at all. And that’s what makes their story tragic – that so many lives were lost for nothing. And I couldn’t help but feel anger when a large group of Japanese soldiers held grenades to their chest and blew themselves up. You want to be able to break them out of their spell, to tell them that their deaths are without reason. And I guess it’s telling that it was in these sorts of scenes, ones were you feel like you’re not being manipulated, that I felt the most sympathy for the Japanese. The film didn’t need to try as hard as it did to communicate the waste of the conflict, you can feel it completely in moments like the one described.

Another moment that I found powerful was when we see a Japanese pillbox get attacked by American soldiers – they attack it with a flamethrower. We actually see this scene first in Flags of Our Fathers. Therefore, rather cleverly I think, Eastwood is asking us where our priorities lie. In the previous film we maybe cheered or smiled or were pleased that the enemy died, but here we’re confronted with the reality – it wasn’t the enemy that were killed, it was a group of ordinary people from a different country who were unlucky enough to get caught up in the conflict. There’s no joy in their deaths. It’s simply a waste.

One of the flag raisers at Iwo Jima, he was roped into the drive to sell War Bonds and was destroyed by the attention he garnered. In particular what I found sad was, near the end of his life, his status as a fifth-rate tourist attraction. There’s a scene near the end when he’s labouring in a field. Suddenly some tourists turn up, have their photo taken with him and scuttle off. The man’s whole life has been reduced to one moment, one photo. That’s the only thing people will remember him for. He’s not even a person anymore; he’s an image.

But what’s a hero anyway? That’s one of the questions the film puts forward. The three flag raisers certainly don’t think they deserve that distinction, and in a conventional sense they probably don’t. The picture was taken a few days into a month long campaign – it wasn’t signalling victory. But an image takes on a life of its own and acquires its own meaning. It becomes less about the people in the photo and more about the person who views it. But even though the photo was a manipulation it helped the war effort. Therefore the self-sacrifice the soldiers made in selling this story and perpetuating this myth could actually be deemed heroic – they helped raise money and helped the allies win the war.

However, there was a price to pay. Ira Hayes paid with his life and the other two soldiers lived in obscurity. We even hear one of them get turned down for a job that was promised him when he was flavour of the month, when his name had currency. But as soon as the war is over the rich businessman who promised this guy the world fails to live up to his promises. Even though it didn’t surprise me, it made me pretty angry. And it was sad to hear that one of the guys had to eek out a living as a janitor. These people fight for their country, loose their friends and sell their souls in some tacky circus sideshow to sell War Bonds, and they get shat on. It makes you wonder why they bothered.

But as one of the characters says, they fought for their friends, not for their country. And, for me, one of the most upsetting things in the film was the image of an old man sitting on the stairs wondering aloud where one of his buddies had gone. It transpires that he’s talking about a young kid in his platoon called Iggy (played by Jamie Bell) who suddenly went missing during a battle. What then happens in the film (the discovery of Iggy’s dead body) isn’t particularly well executed (we never see the corpse) but the real life details, for me, made the story of this battle even stronger. Iggy’s body was found mutilated, and it was suspected that he was tortured by the Japanese for a few days before being bayoneted and clubbed to death. I can sort of understand why these details are left out of the film – it would certainly be hard for a lot of people to feel sympathy for the Japanese in Letters From Iwo Jima if they knew all the grisly details – but I think shrinking away lessens the impact the film would have had. I don’t think a lot of people really understand or appreciate the hardships the soldiers went through. Part of this is because we only get a sanitised view of the war. Pardon the pun, but we never see the full picture.

Of course, having said this, the film does feature some extremely violent battle scenes. But then again it’s become common for war films to feature lots of blood and guts. Anything less would disappoint. And I do have to say that the battle scenes impress. They’re visceral, brutal and full of grisly little details – there’s one bit where a soldier gets hit on the head by a decapitated head. I also like the way that we rarely get to see the Japanese. It’s almost like the Americans are fighting thin air. But although the battle scenes are never anything short of excellent, they’re not the heart of the film. The heart of the film is the picture of the flag.

As we’ve seen in Iraq with the pictures of prisoners being tortured, photographs can do great harm for a war effort. But as Flags of Our Fathers shows they can also have a more positive influence. They can rally people behind a cause. They can simplify a difficult message. And although the film is hardly revolutionary, and although it’s not exactly news that heroism is subjective and that the powerful manipulate the masses, I found that the film eventually hit its mark. Sure it took a while for me to warm to it, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised.