Almost as pointless as covering Led Zeppel- oh.

David Fincher has always been a filmmaker I've felt that I should like more than I do. I mean sure, I think Se7en is one of the stone-cold best films of the 90s and I'm of the (not at all big enough) camp that believes Zodiac to be even better. Hell, I even have time for the assembly cut of Alien³ most days. Here's a director with two honest-to-god masterpieces under his belt and a strong vision all of his own. And yet, I find it very difficult to ever get very excited about any new film he brings out. You see, David Fincher has fucking awful taste in projects. Alien³? Forgivable, he was an unproven music video director at the time. But then after proving to the world he was someone to pay attention to with Se7en, he followed it up with Fight Club, a film of consummate craftsmanship that is unbearably obnoxious on the rare occasions that it isn't downright offensive. Panic Room has already been condemned by history and needs no help from me, so I will settle for describing it as 'baffling', and the only outright 'bad' film of his ouevre. Zodiac was magnificent and very much a logical next step for the director of Se7en and a sign that he was well on his way to a bright future. So of course he followed it up with the unspeakably dull Benjamin Button, a film so competent and airless that it's not even interesting enough to be bad. Naturally, it went over well with the Academy, and having got a foot in the door at the Oscars, he returned with the edgy and topical The Social Network, a witty but forgettable script by the vastly overrated Aaron Sorkin that was never unenjoyable but ultimately forgettable and felt like a waste of the efforts of many very, very talented people. Now he's back with an adaptation of tepid bestselling thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's not entirely mediocre. And that ends up being kind of the problem.

I perhaps shouldn't have gone on at such length to start with. The thing, you see, is that there is very little less interesting than talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. By this point in time the vast majority of people will be familiar with the story: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (in this version played by Daniel Craig) is invited to an island in the north of Sweden to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Harriet Vanger at the request of her still-grieving uncle Henrik (Christopher Plummer, who treats his dialogue like it's a race and babbles out exposition with no emotion other than the vague sense that he'd rather be elsewhere). During his investigation he crosses paths with the titular Girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a royally fucked-up ward of the state who has been dealing with an abusive carer (Yorick van Wageningen) and they join forces to get to the bottom of things, then Stieg Larsson complains about finance speculators for a hundred fucking pages.

It's likely anyone interested in TGWTDT is already familiar with one of its earlier incarnations, be it the book or the Swedish film, later adapted into a TV series as well. I certainly am - in fact, I was already pretty much sick of the story by the time this version came around. The mystery at the core is not without its appeal, but it's hardly one for the ages, and the socially conscious window-dressing feels staler and staler with every retelling.

None of this is the fault of Fincher or his incredibly talented team - in particular, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score betters even their own masterful work on Social Network, and longtime Fincher collaborators Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's gunshot editing is propulsive and timed within an inch of its life. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth paints Sweden in a pallette of slate greys and sickly fluorescent yellows that is initially perfectly atmospheric and gloomy but becomes tiresome by the end of the film's 158 minutes (a compromise with the studio - Fincher's original cut runs three hours and thank god for someone with sense stepping in). It's technically flawless and not even without its fair share of artistic merit, but it feels like so much wasted breath on (and even sometimes at odds with) Steven Zailian's functional script or even Stieg Larsson's by-turns dry and vaguely sleazy novel. It's impossible in any meaningful way to call the Swedish version a better film, but something about that version's TV-level production values and artistic sensibilities felt more appropriate to the quality of the story it was telling.

The only remarkable part of either film version, really, is its leading lady. I'm more partial to Noomi Rapace's turn in the Swedish film, who tapped some incredibly dark places to find a version of Lisbeth Salander who might actually exist. Fans of the book will likely prefer Mara's decision to play the character as written; much more artificially a Character, she still acquits herself just fine playing the hell out of it. Craig, meanwhile, is miles away from the bland charm of the original's Michael Nyqvist, happy to play the character as weary and grumpy and kind of an asshole in an incredibly magnetic way. The Swedish film landed Rapace international stardom and the chance to break into Hollywood, a move which I hope and pray pays dividends, but only time will tell. Mara doesn't seem to have attracted quite the same accolades, but with an Oscar nomination* under her belt her future looks bright all the same. If it means more performances of this calibre in future then I wish her the best of luck, and promise to try my best not to think of her as 'that girl who sleepwalked through the dreary Nightmare on Elm Street remake'.

Ultimately there's nothing concrete I can really criticise about TGWTDT beyond how damn unecessary it feels. But at the same time it's hard to respond to it with anything more than muted enthusiasm. And I'd have liked to have been able to respond to something that so many great people have toiled over with something more than such faint praise. It's frustrating in a way that nothing in the film can make up for. Maybe next time, David. I hope so. I really do.

6/10

*Hasn't got a hope in hell of winning, though.

Letters From Our Fathers

It is almost impossible for me to believe that Letters From Iwo Jima (originally given the far better title of Red Sun, Black Sand) was filmed back-to-back with Flags of Our Fathers. There isn't a single complaint that I leveled at that film that hasn't been deliberately excised from its sibling with surgical precision. It's just as well, too, because the American-made film focusing on the Japanese who fought at Iwo Jima as a companion to a film that was already hopelessly indelicate could very easily have been a total disaster. Instead, it ended up the finest war movie of the last decade.

Eastwood clearly knew how much was riding on the movie, because all the stops have been pulled out in making sure everything hews as close to real Japanese culture as humanly possible. Understanding that there was no way Paul Haggis could be allowed anywhere near the material, Eastwood instead hired Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita (a woman with precisely zero other film credits, before or since) to pen the script. Haggis gets a story credit, but I suspect it may just be because Letters parallels his Flags script, as it must. The cast is also composed entirely of Japanese actors speaking their native language in place of the usual Hollywood approach of casting a slew of Pan-Asian actors and letting them butcher dialogue in a language that they quite possibly don't speak at all. I'm far too Caucasian to pass judgement myself, but the tremendous critical and commercial success that Letters saw in Japan makes me fairly comfortable in believing that there are no serious representational gaffes here.

The level of dedication shines through in the film itself. It's impossible to doubt for a second the filmmakers' dedication to their characters. If Flags was already a war film of unusual humanity, Letters bests it by a spectacular margin. Like Flags it focuses on three particular soldiers in the fight for Iwo Jima without ever really being about them at all. Where Flags was also about those men struggling to come to terms with life after the fact, Letters is instead about the fact that these men are going to die, and they know it. The letters of the title are written by the film's characters to their families, but they are written for the characters themselves, who know full-well that neither they or the letters will ever leave Iwo.

If I described Flags as 'restrained', the only adjective I could rightfully level at Letters is 'meditative'. In my review of Flags of Our Fathers I said that Iwo Jima was by far the most important character in the film*, and that it was never better than the moments it returned to that island. Letters From Iwo Jima (aside from a handful of flashbacks) never leaves those shores, and this allows it to settle into a steady rhythm, following the Japanese soldiers as they each continue trying to exist in the only way they know how. Even when the war finally reaches the island it's made to feel like an inevitable fact of life introducing further complications to the characters than the bloody combat that it really is. Even more than Flags the warfare is painted in broad, abstract strokes, with cinematography so desaturated that it more suggests colours rather than capturing them on film.

With its gentle rhythm, stripped-down aesthetic and endless reserves of humanity it's difficult not to become caught up in the lives of those Japanese soldiers yourself. When the inevitable comes and people start dying, their removal from the film's fabric feels more painful than the countless hectic, brutally violent war-film deaths. Being an Eastwood film, it's entirely unsurprising that Letters is a formal masterpiece. Being an Eastwood film, it's altogether surprising and greatly pleasing that it should so perfectly balance bitter anti-war outrage and raw emotion without ever feeling less than absolutely genuine. The director is genuinely not known for keeping his emotions in check, but he manages it here with grace to spare.

That Letters From Iwo Jima is alone the finest war film in a decade, probably more** would alone make it worthy of being remembered. The real magic, though, occurs in a roughly twenty-minute passage in the middle of the film where it directly overlaps with Flags of Our Fathers. In these moments the two films together do something that transcends either of them. No matter which of the two you are watching, it becomes impossible not to think of the very real men and their struggles on the opposite side of the battle, even as they appear no larger than ants milling about before the camera. In this way, both films (Flags especially, since it had further to climb) overcome their limitations, even many of the ones endemic to the medium, to become among the most powerful and effective anti-war statements ever conceived.

*At least, I wish I had.

**With the concession that The Thin Red Line beggars a descriptor like that.

Flags of Iwo Jima

Few great movies exist that are not subject to flaws. This is nothing new. It is rare, however, that great movies  are such in spite of flaws quite as big as the ones that face Flags of Our Fathers, a Clint Eastwood-helmed war film that uses the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo as the centrepoint for a bold and sometimes shockingly vicious mission to re-evaluate just how we as a society should necessarily feel about World War II.

I know this to be the movie's mission, because writer Paul Haggis (working here with William Broyles, Jr.) was afraid I might not pick it up and helpfully has one of his three lead characters state it out loud in just about every scene. Namely soldiers John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe, in a rare turn of not making me want to punch him), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the three men responsible for putting the flag up that day who lived long enough to report on the experience to their superiors.

Ira is also Native American, something Paul Haggis would like to point out at every possible opportunity, because apparently he wasn't quite done being condescing about race issues in America after the suffocatingly preachy Crash. This is to say nothing of Ira's DRINKING PROBLEM. Barely a scene passes in which he is not seen DRINKING ALCOHOL, or teetering around and being belligerent because he is DRUNK, at which point someone will remark on how very DRUNK he is, and that just maybe his DRINKING PROBLEM is the result of POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS. Because he was a SOLDIER. In the WAR. And you WEREN'T. I could happily hang shit on Paul Haggis and his shortcomings as a writer forever, but that would be a great disservice to the film and to anyone reading this review. Suffice it to say that Flags of Our Fathers is not at all a good script and leave it at that.

Thank god then, that Eastwood was not at all interested in sitting back and letting the script carry the film. It is his work (with, of course, his regular collaborators, cinematographer Tom Stern and editor Joel Cox) that elevates the film from 'Flags of Our Fathers, terrible script' to 'Flags of Our Fathers, entirely respectable war movie'. Anyone who knows anything about Eastwood as a director will find no surprises here - his usual minimalist aesthetic is here in full force, but it is used to uncommonly good effect. Where Haggis will bleat the same theme at us scene after scene, line after line, Eastwood far more adeptly layers subtle meanings over every shot, carefully, patiently and totally without mercy deconstructing and demythologising World War II without ever daring to marginalise the efforts of the people involved.

Generally speaking, the film operates on three levels: on the base level is the day of the landing on Iwo Jima, depicting the struggle to take the island and the activities surrounding the flag-raising itself. On top of that is the War Bonds campaign in the months after, following the three living flag-raisers on a tour of America to drum up public support for the war effort. On top of that sits the modern-day efforts of one of the soldiers' sons, trying to do the same thing as the film itself - piece together the events of that day and clear away the mess of publicity and hero-worship that has since distorted them. His third, unspoken role is to fill up a totally unnecessary narration track explaining in detail the movie's themes. Also generally speaking, the further things get from Iwo Jima, the living beating heart of the film, the worse they become as Eastwood is less and less able to save the script from itself.

When that heart is exposed, though, Eastwood siezes the opportunity with both hands. Having already established that one cannot understand the sensation of being in a warzone through film, he instead opts to shoot the battle scenes like some kind of hellish dreamscape. Iwo Jima as it appears in Flags (played by Iceland) is sparse, unforgiving and devoid of life (in the words of one of the film's characters, "an ugly, smelly, dirty little scab of rock"). Even at their most hectic the battles that take place there have a bare and surreal quality that gently reminds us of the unknowability of war. Even then Eastwood maintains his careful, controlled visual style, focusing as much as possible on the men fighting it and the way this is, for them, all part of the job they signed on for. And all without using graphic violence as a crutch, like some war movies I could mention. In these moments Flags is unimpeachable, and it carries its themes across in a way that the rest of the film's talking on the subject could never hope to.

So no, the film is not a home-run by any stretch; such a huge disconnect between script and film is never a desirable thing and the movie founders for much of its not-inconsiderable running time. A leaner, meaner script without any of the relentless Haggising (in particular, lose the damn framing device) to go with the brutally lean, mean visuals would have left Flags of Our Fathers in far better shape. As-is it's an uncommonly restrained and humane -albeit unfortunately preachy - war movie that struggles to hold itself entirely upright without its sibling for support. Ah, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.