Movie Iwo Jima
For a fraction of a second at the very beginning of Clint Eastwood's 'Letters from Iwo Jima,' you may think that you are gazing overhead at a field of stars. In fact, you are looking straight down into the ground, at waves of black sand on the volcanic island where, over the course of five weeks in February and March, 1945, an invasion force of 100,000 Americans (two thirds of them U.S. Marines) fought 22,000 entrenched Japanese infantrymen. Only 1,083 Japanese survived the battle, while 6,821 Americans were killed and 20,000 wounded. It's a simple establishing shot: a tilt up from the beach where the Allied forces landed to Mount Suribachi, a rocky knob on the southern tip of the island where the Japanese holed up in a network of tunnels and bunkers, and on top of which the famous, iconic image of the raising of an American flag was taken. That classically heroic-looking photo, and the collateral damage from its exploitation as a propaganda tool to sell War Bonds, was the subject of Eastwood's 2006 'Flags of our Fathers,' the companion piece (or other half) of 'Letters From Iwo Jima,' though it doesn't really matter which one you see first.
The opening moments of 'Letters' have a cosmic zoom-like effect, taking us from the timeless and abstract (stars/sand) into a specific place and time: 'Iwo Jima 2005,' as a title denotes. It was on this barren little sulfuric spec in the Pacific Ocean, only about five miles from one end to the other, that so many people fought and died 60 years ago. ' ended with a similar motion, going from memory-images of surviving Marines frolicking in the surf, to the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi and the battleships in the harbor, and finally up into the sky (another reason you might think you're looking up rather than down at the start of 'Letters,' which begins with a view in the opposite direction from the close of 'Flags'). The camouflaged artillery that proved so deadly and menacing in 'Flags' are, by the start of 'Letters,' just rusty relics at a war memorial site. Archeologists explore Suribachi's caves and tunnels, still marveling at how the soldiers ever managed to build them. And then we're on the beach again, in 1945, as Japanese soldiers prepare for the invasion they know is coming by digging trenches in the sand. It looks like a futile, Sisyphean effort.
Title: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) 7.2 /10. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. Steven Spielberg acquired the movie rights. Clint Eastwood is the Director. Learn more.. Get the Movie! Also directed by Clint Eastwood, this film portrays the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers. Get the Movie! The leading star actors of Letters from Iwo Jima are Eijiro Ozaki, Hiro Abe, Hiroshi Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Ken Watanabe, Lucas Elliot Eberl, Ryo Kase, Shidou Nakamura, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Yuki Matsuzaki. So far the movie has been viewed 343 times. The main movie genre categories for Letters from Iwo Jima are: Action, Adventure, Drama, War. You are watching the movie Letters from Iwo Jima. The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as.
In a letter to his wife (heard in voiceover) one of the diggers, a puppy-faced former baker named Saigo (, in a thoroughly winning performance), writes philosophically: 'This is the hole that we will fight and die in.' They might have died a lot sooner if they'd stuck with this ill-conceived sand strategy. When the new commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (the always-commanding ), arrives at Iwo Jima, he immediately changes plans, ordering men and artillery to dig in on higher ground. These are the preparations for the massive ambush we see in 'Flags of Our Fathers.' The Japanese, who are seen as fierce, highly organized fighters in 'Flags,' aren't as well-prepared, or well-equipped, as we may have thought. Popular ringtones from movies.
Movie Letters From Iwo Jima
Dashing Baron Nishi (), the Olympic equestrian star who once partied with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Hollywood, appears on the island with his horse, as a symbolic morale-boost for the men. But in a conversation with Kuribayashi over a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Nishi approaches the military reality they face in an indirect manner: 'When you think about it,' Nishi offers, 'it is regrettable that most of the Combined Fleet was destroyed.' This is the first news Kuribayashi has had of that particular catastrophe -- but he already knows he doesn't have the manpower or weaponry he needs to resist the pending invasion. (Again, parallels to under-equipped American soldiers being asked to hold ground in Iraq without the necessary material support from their leaders at home is a part of the movie's frame of reference.) 'The Imperial Headquarters is deceiving not just the people but us as well,' Kuribayashi says. It's a line that could have been adapted from 'Flags of Our Fathers,' which was also an examination of various forms of propaganda, codes of honor, and nationalistic symbolism that are among the primary weapons in any war.