Movie review #3 - Flags of Our Fathers
Nov. 8th, 2006 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catalyst2This was a remarkable movie that I really enjoyed - not in a "WOOHOO!", jump-up-and-down-in-my-seat kind of way but enjoyed in a thoughtful way.
First check of the watch - NEVER (and even stayed right to the very end of the credits)
I am not quite sure what I expected of this movie - Clint Eastwood outdoes "Saving Private Ryan" for bodycount? Sappy melodrama? A romantic view of war? A polemic on the evils of something or other? It was all of these and yet it was none of these because this was a fine, fine movie. The use of flashbacks (which is a technique which usually bores me silly most of the time - hello Lost, I'm looking right at you!) was so well done here because they actually used the flashbacks as opposed to "use" the flashbacks like usual. The use of VO (again another technique that usually bores me silly because it is either needed because the script is so poor that you have to tell me what I am seeing or the writer has so little confidence in his/her own script and/or audience that s/he feels the script won't work) was again well used to push the story forwards.
The three interweaving stories in three time-frames (the battle on Iwo Jima, the "heroes" tour and James Bradley's present-day quest to find more about his father) were also used to good effect. The arcs of the three "main" characters - the three survivors from the second (and most famous) flag raising on the top of Mt. Suribachi - were also strong: Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) lapping up all the attention and fame, anticipation of all that could come of it and yet ending living as a janitor for the rest of his life, Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe in a great performance, btw) living through it, knowing the lie that he lived and struggling with the consequences of what he did and said and finally the painful downward spiral of Ira Hayes (Adan Beach in a brilliant, moving yet never maudlin, performance) because he knew exactly what he had done.
"Wait, the second flag raising?" I hear you cry. Actually this was not surprise to me - I remember reading many years ago about the "peculiar nature" of the flag-raising that was caught in the iconic photo.
The final scenes of the movie are brilliant - a miraculously clean and safe beach, free of bodies and wrecked tanks, the squad (as survived to that point), stripping down to pristine white underwear, bathing in the cleansing waters of the Pacific. Iggy joins them last and Doc remembers Iggy like that - cleansed and joyful. Iggy was butchered to death just days later.
Just magnificent. No glorification of war - just the realization that war, EVERY WAR, is ugly and brutal and the ONLY real reason the soldiers fight is for the squad, for the guy in front of him, for the guy next to him. That and the realization that what we do to soldiers after they come back causes as many wounds as any battlefield.
First check of the watch - NEVER (and even stayed right to the very end of the credits)
I am not quite sure what I expected of this movie - Clint Eastwood outdoes "Saving Private Ryan" for bodycount? Sappy melodrama? A romantic view of war? A polemic on the evils of something or other? It was all of these and yet it was none of these because this was a fine, fine movie. The use of flashbacks (which is a technique which usually bores me silly most of the time - hello Lost, I'm looking right at you!) was so well done here because they actually used the flashbacks as opposed to "use" the flashbacks like usual. The use of VO (again another technique that usually bores me silly because it is either needed because the script is so poor that you have to tell me what I am seeing or the writer has so little confidence in his/her own script and/or audience that s/he feels the script won't work) was again well used to push the story forwards.
The three interweaving stories in three time-frames (the battle on Iwo Jima, the "heroes" tour and James Bradley's present-day quest to find more about his father) were also used to good effect. The arcs of the three "main" characters - the three survivors from the second (and most famous) flag raising on the top of Mt. Suribachi - were also strong: Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) lapping up all the attention and fame, anticipation of all that could come of it and yet ending living as a janitor for the rest of his life, Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe in a great performance, btw) living through it, knowing the lie that he lived and struggling with the consequences of what he did and said and finally the painful downward spiral of Ira Hayes (Adan Beach in a brilliant, moving yet never maudlin, performance) because he knew exactly what he had done.
"Wait, the second flag raising?" I hear you cry. Actually this was not surprise to me - I remember reading many years ago about the "peculiar nature" of the flag-raising that was caught in the iconic photo.
The final scenes of the movie are brilliant - a miraculously clean and safe beach, free of bodies and wrecked tanks, the squad (as survived to that point), stripping down to pristine white underwear, bathing in the cleansing waters of the Pacific. Iggy joins them last and Doc remembers Iggy like that - cleansed and joyful. Iggy was butchered to death just days later.
Just magnificent. No glorification of war - just the realization that war, EVERY WAR, is ugly and brutal and the ONLY real reason the soldiers fight is for the squad, for the guy in front of him, for the guy next to him. That and the realization that what we do to soldiers after they come back causes as many wounds as any battlefield.
