Letters from Iwo Jima.

Directed by Clint Eastwood (Dreamworks/Warner Brothers, 2006)

War movies serve as recruitment posters when they recount heroic tales of our brave boys in combat. Or they give voice to our howling grief at war's insanity when they show the battle scars inflicted on these same courageous lads. But in Clint Eastwood's startling companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamworks/Warner Brothers), we have a war movie that dares to cross the mine-strewn battlefield of our imagination and tell a tale of other people's sons--of the boys of our enemies.

In this story of the battle of Iwo Jima told entirely from the heroic and doomed perspective of Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and a small band of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers holding out against an invasion force five times their size, the American actor/director who has spent over four decades exploring and expanding the language of cinematic violence has created a masterpiece of empathic compassion by making us remember the first thing we forget in war--that our enemies are human beings, and that their slaughter is horror.

We have seen Japanese or German officers making speeches or plans in their native tongue in other war movies, but these clips of cinematic realism were always brief intermissions in the grander tale of our own victory. Here Eastwood and screenwriter Iris Yamashita have fashioned a Japanese tale of war in which the American forces are given the same dismissive treatment we usually reserve for our foes, a tale in which the individual humanity of Japanese soldiers receives the same loving attention our GIs got in Saving Private Ryan (Dreamworks) and Band of Brothers (HBO). Here are men writing home to their wives with apologies for not having taken care of some small household task, and officers saddened to turn their guns on soldiers from a land they have known and loved--America. Eastwood has spoiled our taste for war and made our enemies' sons our own.