You Rank It: Films with Historical Settings

 Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) - Now this is how you make a historically based war movie.  I only wish they had left out much of that "epic" CGI stuff, or at least done it a little differently.  It looks like a video game and spoils an otherwise flawless plot execution.   Attempting to tackle the Japanese psyche of 1945 was a bold move, but I think they nailed it.  Unlike its whiny companion Flags of Our Fathers this one never loses its re-watchability.  

EDIT: I revise my statement on the CGI.  It is only a couple of brief, panoramic, nautical scenes that jar.  The remainder - and there is a lot of it - flows quite well. It must have been Flags of Our Fathers that went overboard those shots.  The aviation sequences are especially well done.  On the subject of those nautical scenes, is it really that hard to figure out that putting a hundred or more ships into one shot, where every ship is exactly the same distance from every other, where their speeds are exactly identical, where the wakes of every ship are identical regardless of the size of the ship, that it might not look quite right?  I won't even get into the lighting.  I know that's the most difficult part and the state of the art might not be there yet.  My complaint is that they put it in anyway, knowing it couldn't (yet) be done.  

Which brings me back to another complaint about that Midway movie, which was ALL about those CGI shots.  Producers, directors and/or professional consultants need to explain to the computer nerds making those shots some basic realities of military aviation like, for instance, fighters jettison their drop tanks before going into action (certain well-known combat footage from 1945 with obviously untrained conscripts notwithstanding)!  Like, for instance, the red circle inside the star on the insignia of American aircraft wasn't removed until well after the war got going.  It's pretty obvious the CGI team was told what type of aircraft were needed in what shots to do what things, but nobody ever bothered to check on it to make sure it looked right.

Back to Letters from Iwo Jima there is only one scene that I can find any real fault with.  When Saigo's platoon decides, against orders, to commit honourable suicide rather than cowardly retreat and regroup and keep fighting and being useful, there ensues a series of grisly suicides by grenade, in a small cave, one by one, where Saigo is hit by neither the tiniest drop of blood, nor wounded by even a single fragment of grenade, until the platoon commander, standing in front of him, shoots himself in the head, when Saigo is spattered with so much blood he looks like he was just arrested outside the Tate-Labianca murder scenes.  It's not what happened that rings false, just the way it was shot.  A technical detail.  Letters From Iwo is one of the best war movies ever made. 

Today, after watching this amazing film, I learned about "neo-realism". Neo-realism is to cinema what Tom Sawyer was to literature: The dethroning of the elite protagonist in favour of the common man, the real person with real problems. No wealthy and glamourous elite with white telephones, no unconquerable heroes. It is said to have begun with Obsessione (1943), but it is 1945's Rome, Open City where it comes into its own. Filming began in 1944, just two months after the Allies took the city. The film stock was begged, borrowed, or stolen, with different types spliced together. The city itself is a central character with almost all scenes shot on location.

The story is of the Italian resistance after the fall of Mussolini, after Germany took over as occupiers instead of allies. But there are no swashbuckling heroes here, just ordinary people doing ordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Even the characteristically "bad" Germans are a mixed lot, with the effeminate (though brutal) Gestapo officer offset by his morose and fatalistic colleague.



Other films in the genre include The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Cinema Paradiso (1988) - two of my castaway collection favourites.