Flags of our Fathers

Aroview: Part one of Clint Eastwood’s Pacific double-bill trades unrelenting battle scenes for an insightful and crucially honest back-story into the feted flag-raisers at Iwo Jima: three men who became propaganda pawns in America’s financially-fledging war effort.

Through workmanlike hallmarks, Eastwood reads into the before-and-after history of the pivotal act immortalized in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, revealing the extent of the scars and guilt of those championed as faux heroes. The drama is characteristically straightforward and spare, cushioning the film’s other major centerpiece, a graphic and sprawling reenactment of America’s fight for the strategic Japanese island. And while reiterative of the war genre’s sacrificial themes, this resonates strongly when viewed together with its essential companion piece, LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA.