The problem with violence now is twofold. One, they want to surpass "Ryan," and two, doing it episodically instead of in one fell swoop.
lindy, with all due respect, i think you are exactly wrong about your point on the depiction of the war violence in this film
depicting the hellishness of war, and this battle in particular is essential to conveying the degree of sacrifice and valor of the soldier, grueling as it was to watch, i did not feel that eastwood exploited the carnage in an attempt to out-ryan "RYAN"
i have quibbles about the film, but the graphic depiction of battleground wasn't one of them
i think what eastwood did quite effectively was as is stated in the first review (posted here) keep the camera close to the individual soldier, keeping the audience's focus on the troops as the action unfolds...
it is after all a soldier's story
on a more technical vein, my son will be working next month on his company's reel for the academy awards which will demonstrate how the shots were made, composited, edited etc...the sound editing was superb....if the reel is available online, i will post a link to it here for those curious about the process...
i think the following two reviews reflected my feelings about 'flags' well...
carnageandculture.blogspot.com
Film Review: "Flags of Our Fathers"
MOVIE REVIEW 'FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS'
MORE ON 'Flags of Our Fathers'
A Ghastly Conflagration, a Tormented Aftermath
Clint Eastwood examines the Allied invasion of Iwo Jima in "Flags of Our Fathers."
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: October 20, 2006
It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. “Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment.
The film distills much of the material covered in James Bradley and Ron Powers’s affecting book of the same title about the raising of the American flag during the battle for Iwo Jima. Mr. Bradley’s father, John Bradley, nicknamed Doc and played by an effectively restrained Ryan Phillippe, was one of six men who helped plant the flag (it was the second planted that day) on the island’s highest point on the fifth day of the monthlong American offensive. An Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, immortalized the moment, and American politicians seized the day, sending the three surviving flag raisers — Doc, Ira Hayes (Adam Beach, delivering heartbreak by the payload) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) — on a hugely successful war-bond drive.
Collectively hailed as heroes from sea to shining sea, Rene embraced the spotlight, Doc settled into stoic unhappiness, while Ira, a Pima Indian shattered by Iwo Jima and its dead, sobbed and drank himself into oblivion. The efforts of Doc’s adult son (Tom McCarthy) to tell his father’s story years later give the film its scaffolding, but it is Mr. Beach’s Ira, with his open face and vulnerability, who haunts it. Tears mixing with booze, he floods his scenes with raw emotion that serves as a rebuke to gung-ho fictions like “Sands of Iwo Jima,” a 1949 bad joke in which John Wayne hands an American flag to the real Ira, Doc and Rene so they can raise Old Glory once more, this time over the sands of Southern California.
Mr. Eastwood’s cinematic deconstruction takes a considerably darker view of the historical record. The Air Force had repeatedly bombed Iwo Jima before the American landing on Feb. 19, 1945; by D-Day, barely a blade of grass survived, even as more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers remained dug in. To replicate that scorched earth, Mr. Eastwood drains much of the color from the film’s already muted palette, so much so that many of the scenes on the island look as if they were shot in black and white. It seems impossible that anything living could survive long in this charred, spooky place, and it isn’t long after the invasion that American bodies begin piling up amid the orange-red explosions and dull-red sprays of blood.
During these anxious moments, Mr. Eastwood characteristically keeps his sights (and ears) on the troops and the choreographed chaos of their movements; the focus remains on them, not the filmmaking. When the men hit the shore, the cameras stick close to them, moving and then, during a sudden hailstorm of bullets, running alongside the men as if similarly searching for cover. Despite the occasional bird’s-eye view that underscores the staggering scale of the operation — the hundreds of boats hugging the coast, the thousands of men dotting the land — the filmmaking retains a devastating intimacy, as in a quiet shot of dead soldiers lying facedown on the beach, the water under their bodies receding as if it were blood.
The scenes on Iwo Jima are harrowing, borderline surreal, and even after Doc, Ira and Rene leave the island, they never fully escape it. During the bond drive, the pop of a camera bulb, a flash of lightning and the bang of a backfiring car engine instantly return the three to the island and its horrors, a blurring between past and present that, with seamless, ruthless efficiency, Mr. Eastwood and his longtime editor, Joel Cox, turn into a dreadful memory loop. In Mr. Bradley and Mr. Powers’s book, one Iwo Jima veteran describes seeing his dead friends while sitting in class at medical school; the flashbacks, he says, were “like a movie screen wrapped around me.” We see a version of that movie here, and it is terrible.
Most war movies, even those that claim to be antiwar, overtly or implicitly embrace violence as either a political or cinematic means to an end. Few filmmakers can resist the thrill of the rocket’s red glare and the spectacle of death; the violence is simply too exciting. There are plenty of big bangs in “Flags of Our Fathers,” but because the screenplay, by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, oscillates among three separate time frames — Iwo Jima, the bond tour and, less successfully, contemporary scenes involving Doc and his son — and because the flag raisers were pulled off the field before fighting ended, the violence of their war remains at a frenzied pitch. It doesn’t build, evolve, recede; it terrifies and keeps terrifying.
What do we want from war films? Entertainment, mostly, a few hours’ escape to other lands and times, as well as something excitingly different, something reassuringly familiar. If “Flags of Our Fathers” feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines “Flags of Our Fathers,” not exultation.
In this respect, the film works, among other things, as a gentle corrective to Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” with its state-of-the-art carnage and storybook neatness. (Mr. Spielberg, whose company bought the film rights to “Flags of Our Fathers,” is one of its producers.) Where “Saving Private Ryan” offers technique, Mr. Eastwood’s film suggests metaphysics. Once again, he takes us into the heart of violence and into the hearts of men, seeing where they converge under a night sky as brightly lighted with explosions as any Fourth of July nocturne and in caves where some soldiers are tortured to death and others surrender to madness. He gives us men whose failings are evidence of their humanity and who are, contrary to our revolted sensitivities, no less human because they kill.
One view of Mr. Eastwood is that he has mellowed with age, or at least begun to take serious measure of the violence that has been an animating force in many of his films. In truth, the critical establishment caught up with the director, who for decades has been building a fascinating body of work that considers annihilating violence as a condition of the American character, not an aberration. “Flags of Our Fathers” is an imperfect addition to that body of work, though its flaws are minor and finally irrelevant in a film in which ambivalence and ambiguity are constituent of a worldview, not an aftereffect. Notably, Mr. Eastwood’s next film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” set to open early next year, revisits the same battle, this time from the point of view of the Japanese.
“Flags of Our Fathers” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The representation of war and its battlefield atrocities is extremely graphic.
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Vets give a salute to 'Flags'
Clint Eastwood's movie gets it right, says an audience of men who were at Iwo Jima.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
October 21, 2006
SAN DIEGO — It won't be the largest audience to see "Flags of Our Fathers," director Clint Eastwood's take on the bestselling book of the same name.
But it was probably one of the more attentive. And it was certainly the most knowledgeable.
Several dozen former Marines and sailors who participated in the World War II battle of Iwo Jima gathered at a movie theater here last week for an early preview of the film portraying that battle. It was a quiet crowd, although occasionally a veteran could be heard stage-whispering to his wife or to the friends who joined them: That's what it was like.
And at the end, when the filmmaking gave way to a collage of historic photos on the screen, the already subdued audience became even more hushed. No one left until the pictures were finished and the lights were turned on.
Like the book, written by James Bradley and Ron Powers, the movie captures the horror of the battle in early 1945 that lasted more than a month and cost more than 6,800 American lives and more than 20,000 Japanese.
Book and movie — which opened Friday to critical acclaim — both attempt to demystify the flag-raising picture taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, considered the defining image of World War II.
Hy "Doc" Rabeck, 83, a Navy corpsman who had been in combat in North Africa, Saipan and Tinian before Iwo Jima, was particularly pleased with how "Flags" portrayed the Navy medics who follow Marines into combat.
The lead character, played by Ryan Phillippe, is John "Doc" Bradley, a Navy corpsman who helps raise the flag and is sent home to participate in a bond drive as the War Department seeks to capitalize on the surviving flag-raisers' fame.
"The corpsman [character] was exactly right, the guys on the beach were depending on us," Rabeck said. "You'd hear a scream, 'Corpsman,' and then another scream, 'Corpsman,' and you were on the run again."
Tickets were dispensed to mark the gravely wounded for immediate evacuation. "They gave me 50 tickets. They were gone in the first three hours."
The movie also captured the sense of dread felt by troops as they waited to assault a rocky, heavily fortified island, the veterans agreed.
"We could see it was strictly a suicide mission," Rabeck said. "We knew that most of us wouldn't be coming back."
While some movie-goers might be squeamish at scenes of blood and death, the veterans found them realistic, even vital.
"As we got out of the landing craft, I saw eight dead Marines, right at my feet," said retired Master Sgt. William Behana, 81, who was a 19-year-old private when he landed on Iwo Jima. "Nobody has good memories of Iwo Jima."
As realistic as the combat scenes are, the veterans agreed, they lacked an essential element: the stink of sulfur — the island is volcanic — and of rotting bodies.
"Many of the Japanese bodies had been laying there for weeks, and our guys sometimes laid there for days," said James Shriver, 80, then a Marine private. "Only if you were around 100 dead bodies could you get the true smell of Iwo Jima."
Two of the former Marines appreciated "Flags' " fidelity to other key facts.
Retired Marine Col. Dave Severance, a company commander on Iwo Jima, said he was glad Eastwood included that the flag in the famous picture was the second one raised on Mount Suribachi and that the first flag was removed because Navy Secretary James Forrestal wanted it to take back to Washington.
Many history books say the second flag was needed because the first flag was too small and could not be seen. Not so, said Severance.
"The Marine Corps for 61 years has been saying the first flag was too small," said Severance, 87. "This should put the story straight."
Severance is portrayed by Neal McDonough in the movie, but he doubts whether his brush with Hollywood will make him break a vow he made after the fighting was over.
"I try not to think about Iwo Jima too often," he said. "I think it was worthwhile, that we had to fight it, I just don't want to think about all the men we lost."
"Flags" also tells of the torture and death of Ralph "Iggy" Ignatowski (played by Jamie Bell) after he was captured by the Japanese and the agony of "Doc" Bradley at the loss of his buddy.
James Scotella, 81, a Marine private at the time, also knew Iggy and recalled seeing his body. The gruesome condition of the corpse was a symbol of the savagery of the fight on Iwo Jima. He was grateful both that the scene was included and that the director chose not to exploit the kind of torture Iggy endured.
"It was worse than you can ever imagine," he said.
The veterans did have quibbles. Some thought the jumping back and forth from the battle scenes to the bond drive was confusing; some thought the significance of the bond drive was overplayed.
Several said the portrayal of infantryman Ira Hayes, another one of the flag raisers, was wrong: that he was not nearly as forceful as actor Adam Beach portrayed him.
"Hayes was a very, very shy individual," said Shriver. "The movie has him too aggressive, too outgoing, but it did capture the tragedy of his alcoholism."
(The movie also omits a significant fact from the book: that Hayes' problems with alcohol preceded his enlistment in the Marine Corps or the bond drive.)
Like the book, the movie is concerned with the definition of heroism and the effect of putting the label of heroes on men — the three flag raisers who survived the battle — who believed themselves unworthy of the title.
"They got it right about heroes: The real heroes are the guys we left on that island, the guys who have crosses on the top of them," said James Law, 80, a Marine sergeant.
Nearly all those in attendance said they gave Eastwood credit for trying to assess the effect of Iwo Jima on the survivors. It is not an easy task.
For Rabeck, it's not an understatement to say that the battle changed his life. After the war he went into the floor covering business and dropped plans to go to medical school.
"I spent a lot of time in blood, picking up guts and cutting off guys' fatigues that were soaked in blood," he said. "After Iwo Jima, I never wanted to be near blood again
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