Flags Of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood): Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Barry Pepper Running time: 141 mins . . . . .

WAR movies are either about heroes or antiheroes, but real war isn't so clear-cut.

Clint Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers focuses on the six marines who raised the American flag on the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima - the first outpost of the Japanese homeland to fall to the Americans - and the photograph of their deed that became the most famous image of the war, a symbol of heroism that rallied the people back home. Realising its potency, Washington brought three of the flag raisers home - the other three had been killed a few days later - they were paraded before the nation with a ticker-tape drive down Madison Avenue and a tour of ballparks, ballrooms and town halls across America as part of a fundraising drive for war bonds. They were even obliged to put on their helmets to scale a papier-mâché model of Mount Suribachi in a packed stadium.

Yet while nominally a war movie - with awesome shots of the invasion fleets converging on Iwo Jima and hand-held closeups of the carnage on the black sandy beach, with limbs and heads blown apart, and then the battle of attrition as line after line of marines is mown down by the entrenched Japanese - the real concern of Flags is with the truth of what actually happened and how the manipulation of that truth tarnished the lives of the men involved.

The image became the reality, the men became irrelevant except for what they were made to represent. "Heroes are something we create, something we need, " says the Pentagon publicist who presses them to do their civic duty, and they do while knowing that it is a lie. That's not to say it didn't happen. But in fact six other marines raised the first flag. Nobody fired at them. There was a lull in the fighting. When they got down, some officer wanted a flag for himself, so another one was sent up with six other marines, along with an AP photographer Joe Rosenthal. It was the three survivors of this repeat performance who were saddled with the burden of representing the sacrifice of nearly 7,000 Americans who lost their lives in the battle, which didn't end until 35 days after the flag incident.

"They would be ashamed of me, to see me now. All I did was to try not to get killed, " objects Ira Hayes, a "damned Indian" who eventually got his way and was sent back to rejoin what was left of his unit: out of the 1,688 men of Easy Company, only 177 survived the onslaught. The publicity people regarded him as a liability - "a disgrace to the uniform" - when he got into a brawl after a barman refused to serve him because he was coloured. When introduced at a gala dinner in the Waldorf ballroom to the mothers of men who had died - the dessert was white ice-cream moulded to replicate the flag image, over which was poured strawberry sauce that ran like blood down its sides - he broke down and fell sobbing into their arms. After the war, haunted by the ghosts of friends he had lost, he became an alcoholic. Eastwood shows a family from a passing car as he worked in the cotton fields get out to be photographed with him, then giving him a tip as they continued on their way. Soon after, he died of exposure, aged 32.

The other two marines survived longer. Navy medic Jack Bradley went back to the war but was injured crawling to help the injured. He never talked about what happened to his family.

They didn't even know that he'd won a Navy Cross until after he died and his son wrote the book that inspired Eastwood to film Flags Of Our Fathers.

The third marine, Rene Gagnon, was the only one to get a kick out of being a celebrity, but later found that all the promises of jobs he'd been given by wellwishers amounted to nothing.

None of these men saw themselves as heroes or antiheroes.

They were just 19-year-old kids from the Depression getting out of high school and going right into the war, much like the GIs passing through Shannon every week on their way to Iraq. They did what they had to do, doing their best not to get hit. "They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends, " a narrator comments.

Flags Of Our Fathers, produced by Steven Spielberg, who bought the original rights, stands in its own right as a remarkable movie.

It builds up slowly and keeps everything pared down as is the laconic Eastwood's manner, the battle scenes almost drained of colour except for the blood, the performances restrained, the whole movie a triumph of understatement.

It will in time be eventually judged with its companion piece, Letters From Iwo Jima, filmed almost simultaneously and telling the story of the battle from the Japanese point of view, in particular that of two soldiers who question the fanaticism that led to the suicidal defence of the island.

Already shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language movie - it's filmed in Japanese - Iwo Jima is due to open in Ireland on 13 February.

"Every jackass thinks he knows what war is, especially those who've never been in one, " says the narrator of Flags. Eastwood takes away that excuse.