Saw the movie Letters from Iwo Jima yesterday. Although the film was highly rated, I felt rather disappointed after watching it.
First, the content is relatively thin. The film is said to be shot from a Japanese perspective, but in fact it is not only for Japanese audiences, but also for American audiences, with the purpose of "education of American audiences". But the content is nothing new, and it is nothing more than an old-fashioned thing: that is, the war is cruel, the Japanese soldiers are just ordinary people, they are all drafted into the army, there are various emotional
motivations, some want to serve the motherland, some miss family. Some are brave and some are afraid of death. and so on. They are in complex contradictions and conflicts. To put it simply, Japanese soldiers are also human beings, not monsters, ghosts, or crazy war madmen who have been brainwashed. (The Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima were notorious for not surrendering, and they would rather commit suicide than surrender until the last bullet was killed, causing great trouble to the Americans, causing huge sacrifices, and finally leading to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan).
For some people who don't understand history, human nature, and war, this film may be a little enlightening: for example, for American children: know your enemies, they have a lot in common with you, and they are also people. and so on. But for people of a certain social and mental maturity, this kind of film is relatively superficial. What comes and goes is to spread this concept, and there really is nothing new. In particular, there is a paragraph in which a Japanese officer who won the Olympic equestrian gold medal reads a letter from an American soldier and resonates with the Japanese soldiers, which is simply too old-fashioned. And the lines of the Japanese soldiers: "Aren't they the same as us except that they are Americans/our enemies?" I think people get tired of this kind of stuff when they mature to a certain level.
All in all, the film is a Hollywood-style selling of a concept to a very unsophisticated American audience, but without much depth.
For the Japanese, the connotation of this film is deeply in line with what we Chinese call the "dichotomy", which is to distinguish between the Japanese invaders and the Japanese people. The film strives to portray ordinary Japanese soldiers, explaining their complex psychological motivations and emotions as ordinary people, their insignificance and helplessness in the big era, and then showing the ruthlessness of the base camp and the gendarmerie, which actually pits them against the common people. The commander, General Su Lin, was caught between the two. On the one hand, as a soldier, he has to obey the command of the headquarters and carry out the defense battle. On the other hand, he is very humanitarian. He misses his family, deplores the soldier's life, and understands the military impossibility of defending Iwo Jima. In the end, you can only choose to do your job.
In order to portray ordinary people and General Su Lin, the whole film deliberately downplays the political nature, and is a war described from the perspective of ordinary soldiers. But this film is too deliberately pursuing this result, so the more I watch it, the more I feel like the film "War Mass" ("バルトの楽园") that I criticized before, that is, the depiction of Japanese soldiers in the past is too one-sided and too one-dimensional. Starting to overcorrect now, and making them too humane and one-sided highlights the other side.
It tries to subvert the image of some Japanese soldiers in the past: for example, they would rather die than surrender, and die in a glorious and tragic manner without turning back. Several Japanese soldiers inside were not at all in this mood when they committed suicide. They were very reluctant, helpless, painful, and died very ugly, and they ran away unwillingly. Is this the whole history? I don't think so. There must be some heroic begging for death. From this point of view, the Japanese right wing will not be satisfied with the film either.
In short, this film is pursuing this effect: depicting the Japanese soldiers as American soldiers, weak and emotional ordinary people, forced to be involved in the war. As I said before, this is very thin.
The education and characterization of the Japanese soldiers were also incomplete. In this war, the fact that the Japanese soldiers did not surrender was an important content. There is not much in the film about how the Japanese army instilled this notion in people, except for a few snippets.
And for the description of the entire war/campaign, it's even more flimsy. The film does not clearly and comprehensively show the Battle of Iwo Jima. The audience watched and did not know how the battle was fought. The description of the tragic war is far from enough, it is almost 108,000 miles away. For example, the most tragic U.S. military advance was the underground fortifications held by the Japanese army and burned the living. For example, how tenaciously Japanese soldiers resisted the U.S. military. This film does not show the cruelty of the war at all, nor the tenacity of the Japanese army at that time, nor the cost of the US military. It is difficult to understand why the United States later dropped the atomic bomb. There is basically no explanation for this issue.
As a movie, the depiction of the battlefield is even more mediocre. It's so ordinary, it's not worth mentioning at all. Anyone who loves brutal war movies is bound to be disappointed. That characterization was a failure for one of the worst wars in recent history.
The opening and final archaeological excavations of the film are even more clichéd. There are also episodes that come and go.
The whole film feels very uncompact, very long, and I want to sleep after watching it.
Watanabe Ken is great!
Summary: The depth is not enough, the technique is old-fashioned, and it is a commercial film produced by wholesale.
Final score: 5/10 It
is recommended to watch the documentary "Iwo Jima Jade Battle" filmed by Japan's NHK.
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