March 6, 2007
This is a very sad movie about the Japanese side of the battle on Iwo Jima. We are so used to see it from the US point of view, the winner's point of view. Taking the Japanese side of the story--how they persevered for more days than expected with limited food and limited ammunition--LFIW was a very moving elegy. I consider this an elegy because you knew they would lose from the beginning. It was documentation of a lost cause.
It starts out very slowly. The first hour setting up the characters I found quite tedious and overlong. However, the last hour and a half went by unnoticed because of the efficient flow of the storytelling. Being a war movie, you expect violent scenes. Nothing can compare with the group suicide scene with grenades. This was shot so close up! Very realistic and disturbing.
The Japanese actors were very good indeed. Ken Watanabe--wow! This guy is an imposing yet charming master of his craft. "The Last Samurai," "Memoirs of a Geisha", now this. His General Kuribayashi was nobility personified. The actors who played the simple baker forced into the military service Saigo (the character the ordinary movie viewer can most identify with), and the dashing Olympic gold medallist-equestrian and officer Nishi, both played their roles excellently.
Much much better than "Flags of our Fathers" in my humble opinion, in terms of story and acting and technicalities. You cannot help but sense a pro-American sentiment somewhere in the story, as the two "good" Japanese officer characters Kuribayashi and Nishi both just so happened to have lived in the United States previously.
As a side gripe, I don't know how this current trend of showing movies exclusively in one or two cinemas began. Like this movie was shown only in two movie houses in Makati! It really takes time and effort to go see these masterpieces nowadays here.
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