15, 132 mins

Clint Eastwood’s expensive assault on the tiny Japanese island of Iwo Jima is the most chaotic and splintering account of close combat since Tom Hanks stumbled up Omaha Beach with orders to save Private Ryan. But Eastwood’s soldiers have no magical Spielberg plot to protect them. They put their faith in awesome firepower. A huge fleet of American ships steams over the horizon like Greeks in search of puny Troy. Fighter pilots spit pounds of lead into the silent scenery. Thousands of lusty troops prepare to swarm across the black volcanic dunes, only to be shot to bloody bits as soon as their boots touch sand.

The fierce Japanese resistance is the first real shock of the film. The second is the documentary brutality of the campaign. The strategic wisdom of attacking this far-flung lump of rock begins to look like criminal folly.

Flags of Our Fathers is hardly novel in this respect. Ever since Vietnam, the notion of a just war has been treated with profound suspicion, not least by Hollywood directors. But I have rarely seen a film this big and mainstream hit such a raw nerve. Eastwood’s cynicism chimes alarmingly with the current antipathy to the war in Iraq. In Flags of Our Fathers (see feature, page 18), the American public begins to question the ghastly price of the Pacific campaign. The war is bankrupting the country. Local heroes pour back in body bags.

The touch of genius is that a companion piece — Letters from Iwo Jima — that relives exactly the same events from the Japanese perspective is due for release in February. This extraordinary experiment, with massive casts and the biggest budgets of his career (courtesy of Spielberg and DreamWorks), belies Eastwood’s supposedly twilight years (he’s 76) and reputation as a stony Republican.

Background

• Flags of our Fathers

• Letter from Iwo Jima

• The unheroic face of war

• Eastwood war film 'waves flag of bleeding hearts'

• Clint Eastwood

Ken is Clint's main man

Letters from Iwo Jima looks like becoming the main attraction

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Many critics felt that Eastwood had arrived too late in the directing game — and with too much iconic baggage — to play fresh tricks. But he has crushed all sorts of odds.

The entire film hinges on a single photograph that has become one of the most famous images of war. On February 23, 1945, a weary bunch of soldiers climb up Mount Suribachi during a lull in the slaughter and plant the American flag on top of the island. A short scuffle costs them dear. A visiting politician sees the flag and demands it as a souvenir. The order goes out to restage the vignette with a new flag, and a photographer called Joe Rosenthal takes a picture of the six faceless soldiers for posterity. Half the flag raisers die in the next volley of bullets.

But the image has an uncanny impact. Two hundred newspapers plaster it on the front page. The three bewildered survivors are shipped home as bona fide heroes. They spend the rest of the film flogging war bonds and scaling papier-mâché models of Mount Suribachi at baseball games to the delight of screaming patriots.

The haunting irony is that their heroism is a photogenic lie. But the needy demand for instant heroes, and the desperate scrabble to flog $14 billion worth of war bonds, turns this propaganda exercise into a hollow fraud.

The soldiers are pimped with ruthless indifference by a team of minders. Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) has never put his finger on a trigger. John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) has lost infinitely more lives as a front-line medic than he saved. And the traumatised Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Native American, becomes an alcoholic.

Beach’s performance as the deeply unwilling Hayes is a tour de force. The film unwinds through his jaundiced eyes. He is routinely ignored. He is the butt of cheap jokes about his tomahawk skills, and a blubbing liability on the fund-raising circuit.

There’s a sickening and relentless familiarity about the publicity stunts that is impossible to ignore. The film is based on a biography by James Bradley whose own father, “Doc”, delivers the death-bed confession that drags the whole guilty story into the cold light of the present day. Unfortunately, the time-jumping narrative occasionally gets snagged on anecdotes and characters which barely seem relevant to the story. But Eastwood has made an eloquent and important film. If Letters from Iwo Jima is half as powerful again he may well have created a sensation.

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