| Overall Grade: |
B |
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| Story: |
C+ |
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| Acting: |
A- |
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| Direction: |
B+ |
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|
| Visuals: |
A |
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Good, but could have been great
by Eric (movies profile)
Feb 12, 2008
44
of
52 people found this review helpful
10/20/06
I'll be honest. I was dying to see Flags of Our Fathers ever since they started showing commercials for it a few weeks ago. Its Saving Private Ryan-style war scenes and great story potential instantly drew me in, and I waited impatiently for the past couple of weeks. Finally, the day had come, and my neighbor and I rushed out to see the 12:45 PM showing. I was checking the review scores as they had been appearing on Rotten Tomatoes, and the critics generally had positive things to say. Either way, I wanted to see this movie pretty badly, regardless of how good or bad the reviews were. After all, this is Clint Eastwood we're talking about, winner of the Academy Award for Best Director twice. He won for The Unforgiven in 1992 and for Million Dollar Baby in 2004. And by the way, those movies won Best Picture too. So what do we have here with Flags of Our Fathers? It's about World War II, and, more specifically, the events surrounding the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific Theater. Basically, it's about the famous photograph.
My problem with Flags of Our Fathers is that it's too much of a drama. While we get a nice taste of a 15-20 minute battle scene that is truly spectacular, it becomes apparent afterward that the battle itself is not the main focus of the movie and from then on it gets less interesting. The story itself is just too fragmented, probably as a result of there being too many characters to keep track of. By the end of the movie I could only match two names to faces. Anyway, of the six soldiers who raise the flag in the photograph, only three of them survive the battle. These three are prompted by the government to go on a tour of America in an attempt to raise much-needed money to fund the war.
So really there are three different settings for this movie. 1) The son of one of the two surviving soldiers attempts to gather information about the photograph in the present day. 2) After the battle is over and the photograph becomes famous, we follow the story of how the three soldiers handle the fame. 3) We have the battle itself.
This story is decidedly non-linear. Roger Ebert coined the phrase "hyperlink cinema" to describe the 2005 movie Syriana, and I think Flags of Our Fathers also falls under the same category. The story is not nearly as difficult to follow as in the case of Syriana (which was downright impossible), but it's more of an issue of characters than separate storylines. As I said before, it's just too hard to keep track of them all.
The story is also more of a drama than a war movie. About 20 minutes into the movie there is a triumphant battle scene on Iwo Jima. It really is terrific and I can't stress enough how good it is. After this battle scene, however, the story begins to focus on the three surviving soldiers, with frequent flashbacks to short battle sequences. Unfortunately, after the great battle scene towards the beginning we don't get to see a continuous battle again.
In the end the movie begins to unravel. There is no climax, which I consider to be a basic story error. Instead Eastwood opts to use the final minutes to bring the story back to the present with flashbacks to the battle's aftermath. I would consider the great battle scene to be the climax and everything that happens afterward to be a steady resolution. The problem is that this resolution just keeps going and going, and by the end I just didn't care anymore about what eventually happened to these guys. While I would have graded this movie in the 3.5 star, B+/A- range until the final thirty minutes or so, I have to knock down my final grade somewhat. It was a little frustrating to plea for the movie to end, since my satisfaction with the movie ebbed significantly. The first 75-80% of this movie is very well done, but it falls apart at the end.
3 stars out of 4; B |
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