From its subtitles on down, Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima inverts the war-movie experience – at least for those of us who expect such pictures to follow in the footsteps of Saving Private Ryan and Eastwood’s own companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers. With Japanese soldiers batting the same sacrificial puppy-dog eyes that blond-haired and blue-eyed Americans have batted in Hollywood war movies immemorial, Letters seriously jars our sense of rooting interest. It argues that the best war films aren’t about rooting for one side over the other. They’re about rooting against war.
