Review
I don't think this film is as good as Letters from Iwo Jima. Granted, what the men went through on Iwo Jima was absolutely horrible, yet I think that story can be told without considerable emphasis on visual gore, which this film has in abundance.
A good deal of the film deals with how the surviving members of the flag-raising group (second flag raising, that is), were basically used as media bait in order to help the country raise money. The men went from being soldiers to being media darlings, and it was not an easy transition.
I do think some of the narration is very well done, and very significant, but I think the overall tone of the movie is not very positive; it's more how these men were exploited by their own country. It also sometimes gets a little annoying how the film jumps from someone talking to the survivors in the present day to the actual battle to the bond tour and back and fourth in various directions.
I won't say that I actually disliked the film, but I was disappointed by it.
Synopsis
The movie opens with an old man having a nightmare about being on Iwo Jima. There's also scenes in a funeral parlor. The best part is the talking that is going on about the nature of war.
Then there's some really good taking about how important photographs are in a war, especially the photo of the second flag raising on Iwo Jima.
Unfortunately, there's an incredible yucky (at least to me) scene of a severely wounded soldier, so for anyone upset by such admittedly realistic scenes, when the one soldier goes out to help another, very early in the film, you might not want to look.
The film, of course, centers on the men who raised the second flag.
Then there's scenes of training for Iwo Jima, and an officer explains about their target. There's a re-creation of a broadcast from Tokyo Rose. The scenes of the first wave attack show how the Japanese fought from concealed underground positions and gives the viewer an idea of the intensity of the fighting.
The movie is WAY more gruesome than Letters from Iwo Jima. Decapitated heads and other body parts are just typical of what is shown.
There's also some jumping around, going from the invasion to two guys talking about who was involved in the flag raising.
The film also dwells a lot on the media frenzy about the flag raisers, and how they were used to raise money for the war. There's also a good section about the politics behind all of that.
The movie covers the raising of both flags, and why two flags were raised.
Then there's some more extremely gory scenes about Japanese who blew themselves up with grenades. The deaths of the other flag raisers are covered, along with the drinking problem of Ira Hayes and some anti-Native American prejudice that he ran into back in the states.
Then the movie goes into the post-war history of the surviving flag raisers.
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