Being a huge Clint Eastwood fan it hurts me to say that this film was nowhere his best. The battle scenes in the movie are awesome but the drama surrounding them is poor. The story is not interesting and you feel no empathy towards the three main characters at all. The typical Hollywood overuse of sickly sweet syrup doesn't work at all and adds a degree of unbelievablity to the film that completely ruins it. The best I can rate this is a "maybe", but even that be too much.

A great story, the movie didn't do it any justice.

I've seen almost every film Clint has ever made -- this is the 'remarkable' companion-piece to "Letters from Iwo Jima".

Standing on its own, this is a sickly saccharine, gushingly patriotic drivel.

However, when viewed with the second part, "L.F.I.J." told from the equal perspective of the Japanese, it is sharply revealing as a political comment on the way armed conflict is sanitised and propagandised for the gullible public. After viewing both films, it's all too clear that Eastwood never intended this to be another "Saving Pt.Ryan", rather an exposé of the blindly nationalist attitude of both Americans and Japanese.

If you plan just watching the one piece, I suggest you don't bother - "1/2 star". However, the two films together make a truly worthwhile story, reinforced with Eastwood's skilled craft and an original perspective - "***1/2 stars".