Surrender and Survival in the Crucible of Battle (NYT on Clinton Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima)

THE obvious novelty of Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” is that this quintessentially — you might even say iconically — American filmmaker has made a World War II movie from the Japanese perspective. This does not mean, of course, that he is on the side of the enemy, but his camera is very much at the side of the Japanese soldiers, and in their midst. Hewing to the visual and narrative conventions of ground-level combat realism, Mr. Eastwood’s film is less concerned with why they fight — they fight for the doomed, dubious cause of Empire, sometimes in the face of their own disillusionment, skepticism or indifference — than with how they fight. Which is to say, for the most part, how they are defeated and how they die.

These are not simple matters, though the immediate causes of the individual and collective losses are clear enough: the Japanese forces are outnumbered and outgunned, defending their grim little island without hope of support or reinforcement from the sea or the air. They move through a maze of tunnels dug into the volcanic rock, firing out at the advancing marines. They are crushed under rocks, pierced by bullets, immolated by flamethrowers, blown apart by artillery rounds. And, with increasing frequency, they die by their own hands, at the command of their superior officers, for whom any retreat, even for tactical purposes, is tantamount to surrender: a humiliation worse than physical death.