9.00 pm U.K Time tonight
132 minutes, USA (2006), 15
Average user rating 
(4.4 / 52 votes)
(4.4 / 52 votes)
The story of the American soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima and the iconic World War Two photograph that made them national heroes. Directed by Clint Eastwood
Director:
Flags Of Our Fathers Review
By Leigh Singer
The story of the American soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima and the iconic World War Two photograph that made them national heroes. Directed by Clint Eastwood
One emblematic flag in particular concerns Clint Eastwood's elegiac epic - that raised by American soldiers on Mount Suribachi, highest point on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, key battleground in the Pacific War. The photograph of six figures hoisting their sovereignty on foreign soil renewed national morale and rapidly became the public symbol of the US war effort. The three surviving soldiers, Navy Corpsman John Bradley (Phillippe), and two Marines, Rene Gagnon (Bradford) and Native American Ira Hayes (Beach), were promptly hauled back to the US as real-life heroes and used to kick-start a highly successful war drive: from flag raisers to fund raisers in just one shot.
What the celebrated picture doesn't show is that the six soldiers weren't under enemy fire as they planted their flag; in fact, they were leisurely replacing an earlier, smaller Stars and Stripes, demanded as a souvenir by a self-seeking general. Both flags were erected on only the fifth day of a savage, month-long battle. And Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes were no more - nor less - courageous than their three comrades who died shortly after the shot was taken, only luckier.
Based on the best-selling book by James Bradley, son of John, it's the tensions between the myth and the reality behind it that Eastwood homes in on, much as he did with the western in Unforgiven. If war is hell, then is living the lie of heroism, for both an individual and a country, a kind of purgatory? Or a necessary evil to serve the greater good? Without the war drive, the US military would have gone bankrupt but does that justify the surviving soldiers being forced to recreate the flag raising atop a papier-mâché mountain in a packed baseball stadium?
What the celebrated picture doesn't show is that the six soldiers weren't under enemy fire as they planted their flag; in fact, they were leisurely replacing an earlier, smaller Stars and Stripes, demanded as a souvenir by a self-seeking general. Both flags were erected on only the fifth day of a savage, month-long battle. And Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes were no more - nor less - courageous than their three comrades who died shortly after the shot was taken, only luckier.
Based on the best-selling book by James Bradley, son of John, it's the tensions between the myth and the reality behind it that Eastwood homes in on, much as he did with the western in Unforgiven. If war is hell, then is living the lie of heroism, for both an individual and a country, a kind of purgatory? Or a necessary evil to serve the greater good? Without the war drive, the US military would have gone bankrupt but does that justify the surviving soldiers being forced to recreate the flag raising atop a papier-mâché mountain in a packed baseball stadium?
"Eastwood's most ambitious production"Continue reading
Page 1 of 2 - Next » | View as one page
Posts
