Flags of Our Fathers


Rating = B

Out of the confusion of war came false clarity about heroics and the battle for Iwo Jima. The overview scenes of the battle for Iwo Jima are stunning and impressed on me the size of the invasion like nothing I had ever read or seen before. The close up battle scenes do a good job of showing the horror of war and the facelessness of the enemy, but are hard to watch and to contemplate later. The scenes on the home front where the heroics are used to sell war bonds to raise desperately needed cash to prosecute the war are well done and illustrate the inconsistencies between the actual war and the public story about the war. Unfortunately, the attempt to tell the stories of the six men who raised a flag on Iwo Jima is hard to follow. There are flash backs and flash forwards among there periods of time and place: the continuing battle, the exploitation on the home front, and the modern day author researching the stories of the six flag raisers. Also, it was hard to keep straight which was which of the six men; it might have helped to have celebrity actors in the roles to help us tell them apart.

[2006-11-04]