Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shidou Nakamura
Running time: 141 mins . . . . .

IF Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers was a great movie, its companion piece, Letters From Iwo Jima, showing the same bloody second world war beachhead assault through the experiences of Japanese rather than American troops, is a masterpiece. The two movies were shot back-to-back when Eastwood realised, while filming Flags Of Our Fathers, that making only one movie would be telling only half the story, a fault of most war movies. Too often the defining images of war are determined by the victors.

Letters From Iwo Jima is not just a token gesture at impartiality. It is written by Iris Yamashita and shot in Japanese with a Japanese cast.

Unlike Coppola's Godfather I and II, there is no crossover in the narratives. The two movies are parallel stories that happen simultaneously, their only common reference being that they occur during a fierce Pacific battle in which more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers, sent to a tiny atoll to delay the inevitable American attack on the Japanese mainland, held out for nearly 40 days before being wiped out, their blood mixed with that of 7,000 Americans in the black volcanic sands.

Flags embraces the wider exploitation of what happened in selling the war to the American public and captures the strategic scale of the invasion with spectacular shots of the aerial bombardment and of the vast armada of ships disgorging wave after wave of troops on the beach. Letters is altogether more intimate, taking us down into the honeycomb of more than 18 miles of tunnels, caves and pillboxes from which the vastly outnumbered Japanese forces held out, picking off the Americans with deadly accuracy.

The narrative is structured around letters unearthed from the island decades later and read in voiceover, putting a human face on the plight of a handful of Japanese soldiers caught up in what they knew was a doomed mission. Leading the Japanese is a distrusted westernised general . . .

played superbly by Ken Watanabe . . . whose travels in the US have given him an insight into American thinking that prompts him to overrule his superiors back in Tokyo and abandon the tactic of a suicidal shoreline defence, opting instead to dig in and force the Americans to face his crossfire.

Caught up in the consequences are a baker drafted into the army before he could see the face of his newborn daughter, a fanatical officer intent on ritualistic suicide not just for himself but for his whole unit, an Olympic equestrian champion who by contrast is concerned only with the safety of his men and, finally, a young rookie policeman whose refusal to shoot a barking dog has led to him being sent to Iwo Jima and near-certain death.

Letters From Iwo Jima has the look and feel of a classical Japanese movie. It is beautifully unrushed, developing its narrative through an accumulation of closely observed detail and shot in near monochrome with just tinges of colour.

It captures the enormity of what happens in war through the prism of the individual experiences of just a few men. As with the American soldiers in Flags, "They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends."

While Eastwood made his name in one-dimensional spaghetti westerns where there were just good guys and bad guys, he is now providing a memorable meditation of the human consequences of violence and the futile waste of lives lost in war before their time.

The American vice-president Dick Cheney recently denounced Democratic attempts to restrain George Bush's decision to escalate the war in Iraq by sending in 20,000 more American troops, saying they lacked "the stomach for war".

Perhaps if he was compelled to see Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima he might be less courageous with other people's lives. "Every jackass thinks he knows what war is, especially those who have never been in one, " says a soldier in Flags.