Perhaps the choice of colour for the film had a great deal to do with helping hold the viewer at a point of objectivity (though I do admit I had tears in my eyes on more than one occasion). The image is almost completely drained of colour, to the point that at the beginning I thought that it had been shot in black in white or sepia. It has the appearance of a faded old colour photograph. In the scenes with explosions going off, the orange is so bright in contrast to the dull colours of the surroundings that it has the quality of the hand-tinting that was done to silent films.
This is the first film I have ever seen in which American soldiers are actually shown to do unethical and unheroic things. Having watched countless John Wayne war films, the shock was truly enormous, and marks for me an important shift in the war film genre. Letters from Iwo Jima reminded me of something Agnes Newton Keith wrote in the prologue to Three Came Home, her memoir of her years spent in grueling conditions in a P.O.W. camp with her young son:
The Japanese in this book are as war made them, not as God did, and the same is true for the rest of us. We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you spiritually as the fighting destroys you bodily.
I highly recommend that everyone go out and see the film. It pulls down a lot of stereotypes (“warrior culture”, samurai spirit, uniformity of society, etc.) about the Japanese that have stood for much too long in Western culture.
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