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Flags Of Our Fathers

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Clint Eastwood. Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach

 

Description: The image of six soldiers raising the flag at The Battle Of Iwo Jima turned around the Pacific War for America, re-igniting national pride. Clint Eastwood's war opus explores the events leading up to the iconic raising of the flag on February 23, 1945, contrasting the fortunes of the three surviving soldiers - "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) - as they return home to embrace their new status as media darlings.

Country: US. 2006. 131mins

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Clint's war movie packs a punch

 

Road to havoc: the battle scenes are brutal and bloody

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You wouldn't think that a former Republican mayor would make back-to-back films like Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

But Clint Eastwood, as he grows older and seemingly wiser, has clearly seen the light. His two films are not just audacious and challenging in concept but eager to show both the waste of war and the downside of patriotism.

It is a pity that they can't be shown in cinemas as a pair. But for now we have the first, partly produced by Steven Spielberg: an angry meditation on the iconic Second World War photograph of six soldiers hoisting the American flag on Iwo Jima.

The battle for the Japanese island cost the lives of thousands of US and Japanese troops before it was won by the Americans. The photograph was an instant success back home and the only three surviving soldiers pictured were turned into celebrities to help sell war bonds.

Their involvement in the flag-raising was not what was implied by the now famous image, however. In fact, they only helped lift a replacement flag because a visiting highup wanted the original Stars and Stripes for himself.

The impact on the three returning soldiers was devastating, wreaking emotional havoc and leaving one of them, an American Indian, a hopeless drunk. What, asks Eastwood, reflecting James Bradley and Ron Powers's book upon which his film is based, does the word "hero" really mean?

To the three men, at least, it meant that they were kind of mountebanks while their colleagues, many of whom died, were the real McCoy.

The battle scenes - reminiscent of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan - are brutal and bloody, using CG effects only for the huge fleet whose guns pummelled Iwo Jima before the troops went in to lure the enemy out of their underground bunkers and pick them off one by one.

Eastwood intercuts all this with what happened back home, contemporary interviews with Bradley, whose father was one of the three surviving soldiers, and veterans of the battle, none of whom prove to be the gung-ho types one might expect. Even if he didn't intend it, Eastwood's approach throws up vivid reminders of the mess that is Iraq today.

None of that is to say that this is the best film he could have made. The intercutting is sometimes confusing and off-putting, and his insistence on quick, unfussy takes is occasionally counterproductive. In addition, however well Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach play, you never feel that you get to know their troubled characters.

Eastwood's second film, Letters from Iwo Jima, with opens here next February, told from the Japanese point of view and thus with subtitles, is better. But Flags is still a war film with a bold difference from a director well into his Seventies and one of America's very best.

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