Flags of Our Fathers (**1/2)

? Clint Eastwood directed this film about the Battle of Iwo Jima, among World War II’s bloodiest, and the three men (Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach) who became accidental celebrities as a result of being captured in a famous photo.

+  The battle footage is nearly on a par with the harrowing opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Eastwood conveys the horrors of war with a gruesome realism. The story of Ira Hayes, an American Indian played by Beach, is the most inherently dramatic.

- The script by Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) and William Broyles (Jarhead) is based on a book by Ron Powers and James Bradley. Bradley is the son of the Ryan Phillippe character, John Bradley. Thus the movie carries over a flashback structure that I found weakened the story. For a good deal of the movie, I wasn’t even sure which of the main characters was being portrayed some 60 years later, nor who the guy was interviewing everybody. What’s more, it barely mattered. What’s the use of a scene in which an old guy worries about being a bad father when in none of the movie have we seen him as a parent, and that may or may not have anything to do with the war? Nor do we know anything about the son except that he’s become a researcher? On balance, I think a more chronological approach, plus replacing the present-day scenes with period ones, would have done more to bring the characters to life. As with Jarhead, the movie had a meandering quality. The scenes seemed to add up to less than their sum. As with Crash, the movie hammers its messages home early and often. Simply, they are that war is hell, that the soldiers mostly don’t think of themselves as heroes, and that not everyone always behaves heroically. With the spate of recent war films, the first, at least, is old news.

= **1/2 The story of how the Iwo Jima soldiers became propaganda tools is certainly interesting, but I had the feeling I would have liked the story more had it been a documentary. Admittedly, though, the fictional approach does allow for some brutally brilliantly re-created battle scenes.

IMDb link