Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima” would be one of the year’s best even without its companion piece “Flags of Our Fathers.” With it, however, this depiction of the Japanese forces during the hard-fought WWII battle takes on an absolutely timeless that’s completely one of a kind. Never has a Hollywood filmmaker dared to examine a single battle in such intimately absorbing detail as the Oscar-winning legend does with these two, together the films a unique glimpse inside warfare unlike any we’ve seen before.

In all honesty, this one is even better than his last one. Where “Flags of Our Fathers” had a few narrative difficulties, “Letters from Iwo Jima” has a more intense focus and a much tighter point of view than its fellow epic. Eastwood isn’t trying to speak about the politics and propaganda of war this time out, instead concerned here with the men who fight and the way a battlefront shapes them. As such, the movie is an eerie look into a culture and a mentality far removed from our own, the Japanese soldier looked at as a fellow combatant worthy of honor and respect.

The film revolves around the machinations of famed Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the man responsible for commanding the defense of Iwo Jima. This was a battle he was expected to lose and to lose quickly, his out-manned and out-gunned force no match for the might of the American military muscle. But Kuribayashi bucks convention and designs an underground defense of the island that was completely unanticipated. The battle became a 40-day assault, more than 20,000 Japanese troops laying down their lives to protect their homeland in order to give them one more day of safety.

Iris Yamashita’s screenplay (from a story by herself and Paul Haggis) is a model of tightly-wound efficiency. Taken largely from the letters found decades after the event in the coal-black sands of the island’s tunnels, the movie gives both a face and a voice to the soldiers who died for the honor of Japan. It is a passionately felt epic of honor and valor, a sad valentine to fighting men sent into a battle, not to win, but to die in a hopeless endeavor.

That is the true horror of the piece. Japan knew Iwo Jima was going to fall. They knew the American armada was too powerful and too massive for the soldiers entrenched upon the island to hold off. Yet, instead of supplying air support, instead of trying to figure a way to minimize losses, the powers at be looked at the men on the ground as pawns. It was their duty to die for their country, surrender not just an option to be avoided, it was one to be spurned and looked upon with disgrace.

This surreal concept may seem bizarre to those of us on these shores, but to the Japanese death instead of dishonor was a way of life going back centuries. To think Iwo Jima, no matter what the odds, would be any different is just silly. Eastwood uses these letters of the men fighting the battle to look at this concept, to try and examine how this sort of outlook on warfare effects those expected to die for what, at least on the surface, appears to be a futile cause.

The acting is universally stellar. Watanabe is his usual brilliant self, Kuribayashi a pragmatic warrior understanding the full finality of what lays before him and his army. His goal is for his men to last as long as possible, not allowing them to lay down their lives even though some find the thought of retreat and retrench absolutely abhorrent. Watanabe makes the man a complex, sorrowful figure worthy of admiration and respect, his soulful portrait a dignifying look at a man American history so often depicts as only an enemy.

On the grunt side of things, Kazunari Ninomiya is a wonderfully tragic figure portraying a former baker willing to do just about anything to return to his pregnant wife. The way he looks at the battle would be comical if it didn’t just break your heart, the fact he is supposed to die when there is so much out there for him to live for almost an inhumanly ghastly proposition. Ninomiya’s face is an absolute sieve of emotional discourse, the actor dripping in such poignant vibrancy to watch him navigate the macabre aspects of the assault steals your heart right out from within.

As always with an Eastwood production, the movie is a marvel of technical perfection. It is the human story, however, that gives the picture its unquestioned brilliance. Working with a non-English cast and a culture decidedly different than his own has made the filmmaker take chances and to look closer at the ugly underbelly of things even more in-depth than he already has to wondrous effect in the past.

To call “Letters from Iwo Jima” a masterpiece might be an understatement. To call it the best film of Eastwood’s illustrious directorial career might flip the other way (but not by much). To call it a moving testament and fitting memorial to the men who fought – died – under the aegis of the other flag wouldn’t just be right, it might be perfect.

Film Rating: êêêê  (out of 4)