Letters From Iwo Jima

[King of Snake]

Anyone seen this?
Watched it yesterday and found it very moving, and at the same time a very interesting take on the WWII genre by telling a story from the Japanese perspective. It had great actors all around and some truly gut-wrenching scenes (the mass suicide in the caves for instance) while at the same time bringing up some interesting themes, like how the Japanese soldiers were often caught between their sense of honour and duty for the homeland and their longing to be returned to their loved ones. Or how the soldiers on both sides are made to believe the other side are ruthless savages, but in the end they discover they are really all the same (reading the letter from the dead american prisoner's mother); normal people caught up in a deadly game far away from home. It may sound a bit corny but I thought it was handled really well in this film.

Only criticism so far is that I felt it was a tad long at 2 hours 20 minutes. And some of the flashback scenes later on kind of take the tempo out of the story once the battle is unfolding.

The film "Flags of Our Fathers" is supposedly the "companion" of this movie, telling the story from the American side. I haven't yet seen this but I've heard that Letters... is actually the better movie of the two.