Flags of Our Fathers could be a warmonger’s dream: the true story of the heroic men who posed for the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph that, it is claimed, helped end the war in the Pacific and made us all proud to be American. But director Clint Eastwood, though a known conservative, is not interested in drumbeating polemics. He chooses instead to show his characters as hardworking grunts who come home from the battle weary, frightened, and, at times, disgusted with the rah-rah of the home front. They are also quite obsessed with honoring their comrades who died—a subject that the press, then and now, often shies away from. Even more intriguing, Flags is only the first of Clint’s two films on that horrific battle; the other, Letters from Iwo Jima, to be released in December, will address the Japanese version of the same conflict. Will it take fifty years before a filmmaker of Eastwood’s stature takes such a bold approach with our current conflict?
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