Although beautifully shot and based on a true story of a fearsome and bloody battle, this film manages to be confused, overly long and distracted by the rather marginal question: "Were the Marines in the famous photograph of flag-raising on Iwo Jima actually the ones who put the flag up?"



The action chops and changes irritatingly between different times and the characters are not well-rooted enough for us to be quite sure who is who. When you put these two failings together, it is hard to keep track of who is dead and who is alive. And when we cut to the modern day, with aged vets telling the narrator about their days with his father, it is totally unclear who each one is. I suspect we are supposed to be in tears by this stage (the music would suggest as much) but I was merely drumming my fingers.



So the heart of the film is not the battle, but this question about the flag, which will probably only stir you if you are a) American (and tremendously proud of your flag) and b) easily led by the Forrest Gump school of film-making. The film actually seems to be asking us to care more about the veracity of the flag picture than about all the young men being turned into mincemeat by Japanese guns.



In the segments interspersed in between the Iwo Jima battle scenes, "Flags of our Fathers" follows the story of three of the combatants, yanked back to the States to do a War Bonds fund-raising tour, based on their status as flag-raising heroes. So the key conflict is not American vs Japanese, but the troubled self-reflections of these three men, who have to swallow the truth about the flag to do their duty on the home front.



To cap it all, this version of the DVD, although cheaper than all the 2- and 4-disc sets, has absolutely no special features at all, which was pretty, well... cheap.



If you want to see a much better film about much the same thing, with more focus on the battle and a genuinely moving story, watch the companion to this one: Letters from Iwo Jima.