Those enamoured with Clint Eastwood’s war crime apology Letters from Iwo Jima, pay attention: I challenge you to watch Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain and tell me you still don’t understand what’s wrong with Eastwood’s picture.
Both movies portray a beaten army at almost exactly the same point in history (February 1945), yet they couldn’t be more different. Eastwood’s mission is to put a human face to the battle of Iwo by showing, through flashbacks, that the Japanese were family men with good intentions. Ichikawa, in 1959, had no such grand aspirations. We know absolutely nothing about his shamed and depraved soldiers, only their names. We know they’re Japanese, we know they used to be human, and we know they will die. Whatever else there is — places of birth, thoughts on life — means nothing in the context of this pitiless story.
Unlike Eastwood, Ichikawa entertains no romantic notions of fortitude and holds no hope for miraculous survival. A true anti-war film, Fires on the Plain offers no cultural or political explanation for the savagery on display. War has made men mad, Ichikawa says, and those who made war will bear the responsibility regardless of what one movie propounds. So the focus is on the men, and the final question is not whether they will perish but whether they will do so retaining their humanity. This is the movie’s central conflict, the struggle between man and his inner beast, and because it is handled so beautifully, this gruesome tragedy is to me much more uplifting than Eastwood’s Hollywood trickery.
