FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

XoWizIama Excellent adaptation.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

ElMaruecan82 In his review of "Letters from Iwo Jima", Roger Ebert recalled the line from "Patton"'s iconic monologue, you don't win a war by dying for your country but by making "the other poor dumb bastard die for his country", maybe that's why the Americans won the war after all, they fought to death. Japanese, while honorably, fought to their death, too.And "Flags of Our Fathers", first opus of Clint Eastwood's "Iwo Jima" duology also reminded me of a quote from the same monologue: "an army is a team - it lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap." And as far as exemplifying the team spirit within the army, the famous picture of the flag-raising over Mount Suribashi is quite an eloquent illustration.It is indeed one of the most iconic, parodied and probably misundestood pictures of all time, taken at face value and wrongly translated as the epitome of victory while the battle, one of the toughest and deadliest of WW2, was still going on and half of the soldiers in the picture would eventually die. Interestingly, we never see their faces and for a few of them their bodies, but that's what makes it such a great symbol of anonymous heroism carried by a group, not individuals.In other words, it shouldn't have mattered who raised the flag, and I guess it didn't, what mattered is that it was the American flag and that sight was enough to awaken the Americans from lassitude and convince them to buy bonds. So the American government couldn't rely on a simple photograph, and needed the three survivors to play the game as ambassadors from that moment that stopped belonging to them, but to history, transiting though with politics. Clint Eastwood's adaptations of James Bradley's novel, takes us, in a fascinating introspection into the various perceptions of heroism depending on the perspectives. Even in Eastwood movies I disliked like "Unforgiven" and "American Sniper", I respected morally ambiguous characters for some values they carried and that I could relate to. Here I expected a new "Saving Private Ryan", but Spielberg is "only" the producer, Eastwood isn't the preacher type (not always anyway) and the flag isn't the end, but the beginning.And for the survivors, the beginning of an odd journey. Harlon Block (Benjamin Walker) and Sergeant Michael Strank (Barry Pepper) were all dead and as soon as the survivors were identified, they're taken for a long ride across America to encourage cheerful crowds to buy war bonds. The film unveil many aspects of their lives and how it affected their reactions. The father of the novel's author, Pharmacist "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) is good-hearted and altruistic, he comforted his dying comrades and takes his new assignment as a way to comfort the spirits of people. Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) sort of enjoys his new fame and the attention it brings (so does his girlfriend) but insists that he was just lucky, as they all say, the real heroes didn't come back. The most tragic character and the soul of the film is Ira Hayes (Adam Beach in a performance that should have earned him a few nods), his experience doesn't differ from the rest of the soldiers except that he's of Native background, an outcast status that pushed him to keep a low profile which was perfect for the army body. Being propelled in the main front, not to fight but to pose as a clean-cut hero could only make things worse to him, especially when he's still victim of racist paternalism or plain segregation. Hayes' tragedy is that he's not concerned by politics but politics were concerned by him.The film is punctuated with many war flashbacks that show the incredible gap between the atrocities in the island and the whole backstage show, the most infamous episode is Ralph "Iggy" Ignatowky (Jamie Bell) whose death is only alluded but a glimpse on a Wikipedia page will tell you that some soldiers' blood drop more significantly than other on the sand of Iwo Jima. Violence reached such a paroxysm that there was no possible way for the soldiers to recover unless they decided to keep quiet about it, about the details anyway. And yet the three survivors had to talk, talk and talk.They were even forced to replicate the deed over a mountain made of carton during a big exhibition in a stadium with the typical American fireworks, cheerleaders and all that jazz their supervisor prepared. The pseudo-flag-raising intercut with scenes of extreme violence, showing the deaths of the other soldiers, create a difficult mood whiplash but it's crucial in the understanding of another sad aspect about war, you must pretend.. These guys must act as heroes because the war needed them to be heroes, even the picture while speaking a thousand words, didn't say that it was the second flag raising, causing one of the soldiers to be misidentified, although his mother could, even from behind.The film reveals many secrets about the iconic shot, a lucky one from a photographical perspective and it also reminded me of Jean Gabin's speech in "The President", addressing a parliament member parliament too young to have fought in WW1, he said "you talk about millions but as a guy in the trenches, I can only remember a dozen of deaths, scope differs whether you're in or out the front", indeed.For the politician, it's about the big picture. For soldiers, it's just about kill and not to be killed, and protecting or saving your buddies. The tragedy is more intimate and it follows the 'privileged' ones for the rest of their lives... that's heroic enough to me. And the picture reminded of this adage: when a man points to the moon, the fool sees his finger. The government looked at for the American flag, but Eastwood is pointing to the guys who raised it.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This film concerns the last real fierce emblematic battle (February 19, 1945 - March 26, 1945) between the USA and Japan, the battle for the island of Iwo Jima. The war is coming to an end and after this battle, it will drag on with Japan retreating little by little and this will only be stopped once and for all with the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the end of this battle, the federal government of the USA is unable to finance the end of the war and they use this battle, this victory as the tool they need to launch a final battle in the USA to raise the money necessary to finish the job. But when this battle is finished, won the main actor of this war, Franklin D. Roosevelt dies within weeks on April 12, 1945, and Truman takes over. He is the one who decided to drop the atom bombs in Japan, though of course, Roosevelt is the one who had launched the research and financed the production of these bombs, little boy as the first one was called. Dramatic event that required the levying of millions if not billions of dollars to pay for the next six months of the war. This first film - that has to be twinned with Letters from Iwo Jima - is the battle seen from the American point of view and what's more from the recollections the son of one of the GIs who raised the flag there managed to collect from his father before his death, and the father expressed in his last weeks or months of life the great distance he had taken with this war and this battle. The film shows with all the horror and bloody cruelty you can imagine this battle and how the GIs reacted and survived because that's the master word here: The Gis did all they could to survive and avoid the bullets. Their choice was simple: go through the showering bullets, remain alive, and kill as many people on the other side. Prisoners were not even a question. Then the film shows how three surviving soldiers who raised the flag are enrolled in a campaign across the USA to raise money, including by the reenactment of the raising of the flag. But it is all built on a fake picture. The first raising of the flag was not taken by the photographer following the armed forces, a GI himself, because he was not thre at the time. He only took the "second raising" but in the meantime, one of the four Gis who did it was dead or gone and he was replaced by a second fourth one who will die soon after. The picture that was sent around in the press and the media all over the world cheated then on the identity of this fourth soldier. And both fourth soldiers dying soon after and not being there anymore to testify, two mothers, two families were suffering from the ambiguity. The truth came from one of the three survivors, the Indian GI, who later on, after the war, leaked the truth to the press. The fact that remains is that the federal state and the American political apparatus used this picture and this event for years with even the erecting of a monument representing this particular event. What is important in such situation? The real truth or the dynamism that the official but false truth creates? The reality is that very often the hypocritical truth is the one that works in the media, most of the time because the media do not know it is fake. And today some speak of fake news!The three survivors will have very different careers after the war. The Indian will die officially from exposure sometime after the inauguration of the official commemorative monument, without an autopsy, meaning that an Indian is an Indian and his being a national hero does not count: he is still refused a drink in a bar that does not serve Indians, even when the whole city around the bar is celebrating on this very evening the three survivors and the raising of the flag in a monstrous event in some stadium. The next GI will never get a decent job, nor decent training or education, and he will be a janitor all his life. The last one will have the opportunity to buy a funeral parlor and will prosper as a mortician and he is the one whose son is collecting the last memories.The general idea is that if heroes there are they are all dead: the heroes are those who died in the battle. The survivors were just die-hard lucky survivors who managed to run through a torrentuous shower of projectiles of all sorts and did not get wet at all. Dry till the end, or maybe one or two drops, one or two wounds, but nothing serious enough to put you six feet under. In 2006 the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were getting clogged up in a quagmire and Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg had the courage to tell the wide audience that a war is never anything clean, heroic and that it is essentially a cruel game played by people far away from the front who will use the survivors to reach their objectives provided these survivors do NOT, absolutely NOT, question the basic principles of the society whose elite the war-players at home are, namely segregation and class distinctions, not to mention racism and racial distinctions. Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

denis888 I like WWII movies a lot, and yeah, Clint Eastwood is a real genius, but Homer sometimes nods, so does Clint. What he created here is a mish mash of wild wanton battle scenes, long, much too long sad flashbacks, inept editing, sick sepia tone and on top of that, dry as dust, didactic Told-You_so way of hammering these things onto our heads. The actors are awesome, and they do their best. I cannot say anything poor about Pepper, Patrick, Walker or McDonough, as well as younger cast who also tried to do their best. But all their valiant attempts were buried by sentimental syrupy attitude, prolonged scenes, unnecessary brutal shots, too much of a method hammering, too much of a moral telling, and an overall preachy message that war is evil. We know this. It is indeed evil. The slow tempo of the movie kills all our sincere desire tom like it. We failed. The film is way too boring and tiring and ...yes...obvious. The effort is worth 4, not more

jb_campo Not every Clint Eastwood film is a classic, and that's how I felt about Flags of our Fathers. The film depicts the invasion of Iwo Jim in WW2 and follows the lives of several men involved with the raising of the American flag. This flag picture is perhaps the most famous war picture in American history, symbolizing victory over Japan. But the story seemed hard to follow. There's an older guy narrating for a while and I'm still not sure who he was. Then another guy, and finally a less older person. Or maybe there were only two. It confused me. There were so many men killed that it was hard to remember who was who. Maybe that was the point - that the war was horrible and impossible to track. But it didn't make for easy film following.There were eventually 3 main character who the film focused on, and we learned a bit about them, but not really enough history. Doc seems to be the main character. it would have been good to learn more, but alas, with all the other history going on, it wasn't done.In the end, you know what you knew. War sucks. People die. We honor those who gave their lives for us. And a son loved his Dad, and learned how incredible he was. Yes, that was good, but getting there, well, it took a long circuitous route with too many detours to unimportant details. Flags was OK, but not special. Enjoy.