Letters From Iwo Jima

(141mins, 15) Directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura

Clint Eastwood's account of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima from the viewpoint of the Japanese defenders complements Flags of Our Fathers, his film about the American invaders and the way the iconic photography of Old Glory being raised on Mount Suribachi was exploited for patriotic ends in the States. It isn't the first movie about the war in the Pacific to be made in Japanese and directed by an American. That was the bizarre Saga of Anatahan, the true story of Japanese sailors shipwrecked in 1944 on a remote island and holding out for seven years, refusing to believe Japan had lost the war. Made in 1953 by Josef von Sternberg on sets in a Japanese studio, it received limited distribution and is rarely revived.

Both Eastwood pictures are masterpieces of humanist cinema, forming a magnificent diptych. They're about glory and heroism and bring into question both concepts, centring on a bloody, costly battle for a barren, waterless island of rock and black volcanic sand that happens to be part of the Japanese empire. Letters is framed by the discovery of a cache of letters hidden in 1945 and exhumed 60 years later. They symbolise the burial and retrieval of the past, one of the film's subjects, and as they float down at the end, slow motion is used for the only time.

Unlike Flags of Our Fathers, which centres on the experience of three US soldiers who participated in the flag-raising, Letters pays equal attention to General Kuribayashi (a towering performance from Ken Watanabe) and his staff and to several lowly conscripts, most notably Private Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker in civilian life. Both men are realists, aware that defeat is imminent. But the general, a concerned leader and professional soldier, knows that honour dictates that he must die, while the private is determined to see his wife and baby daughter again.

The film opens with Kuribayashi's arrival, his disgust at the lack of co-operation between the services, the foolish conduct of zealots and the unimaginative plans of defence. Instead of meeting the inevitable invasion on the beaches, he builds a labyrinth of tunnels in which his army lives like burrowing animals. As a result, the battle is extended from the three days anticipated by the Americans to more than a month.

The movie is doom-laden and non-triumphalist, with a plangent score co-written by Eastwood's son Kyle, and characteristically dark cinematography. The flashbacks to Japan involving Saigo and a former military policeman, who's been dispatched to the front line as a punishment for an act of kindness, do not reflect happier times. They show the madness of war fever on the home front.

Kuribayashi's flashbacks to when he studied with the US army in the late 1920s are brightly lit to express his love of the States and the hopes he had for harmonious relations between Japan and America. A major symbol is the pearl-handled 1911 Colt pistol he's given by American colleagues as a farewell present at Fort Bliss, New Mexico. His troops believe he's taken it from a US soldier he's killed and it ends up as a souvenir in the possession of a GI.

The battle scenes are brilliantly handled, and what we best remember are moments of horror: a mass suicide of trapped soldiers killing themselves with hand grenades, for instance, and matching scenes of an injured American being bayoneted by his Japanese captors and two Americans casually killing a pair of Japanese POWs. Yet there are also moments of kindness and dignity as when the general plans for the baker's survival, and a moving encounter between Baron Nishi, the Japanese equestrian star who won a gold medal at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, and a dying marine he saves from his angry men.

The film is based on a scenario by Paul Haggis, who co-scripted Flags of Our Fathers and won an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, but the carefully organised screenplay is the work of Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita, a discovery of Haggis's. It is a fine piece of work, though there are inevitably numerous scenes and incidents familiar from other pictures. Indeed the war movie, whatever its setting, is part of a genre that has its roots in the Trojan War. The film it most brings to my mind is John Ford's poetic, beautifully understated They Were Expendable, released just after the end of the Second World War, and also a case of victory in defeat, in that case of US sailors fighting a rearguard action during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1942. Both raise our respect for the human spirit and enhance our understanding of what it means to live and to die.