Flags of Our Fathers (Movie)

Oscar season is only just getting under way, but on credentials alone a presumptive front-runner would have to be Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” the World War II epic about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, which began screening for selected journalists this week in New York. ... A big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations, “Flags of Our Fathers,” which opens on Oct. 20, was anything but a simple undertaking. With much of film following the surviving flag raisers as they crisscross the country in the spring and summer of 1945 pitching war bonds for a government in desperate financial straits, it is neither a pure war movie nor, given its sweeping and harrowing combat sequences, merely a wartime drama. It examines the power of a single image to affect not only public opinion but also the outcome of a war, — whether in 1945, in Vietnam or more recently.