Flags of Our Fathers

Flags of Our Fathers (2006) is Clint Eastwood's war drama you can watch online on iFILM. It follows six young men who raised the Stars and Stripes over a volcano in the Pacific, and the price each of them paid for that one image.

In the winter of 1945, U.S. Marines land on a tiny Japanese island in the middle of nowhere. The fight for the high ground drags on for weeks, and thousands die. Then a photographer trips his shutter at the right second, and the picture races across America in days. Three survivors, Navy corpsman Doc Bradley and privates Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes, are pulled off the line and paraded through the country to sell war bonds. The catch is that they never felt like heroes: the photo does not tell the whole story, and their friends are still buried in the black sand. Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach and Jesse Bradford lead, with Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell and Paul Walker alongside them.

Eastwood built a pair of films from this: Flags of Our Fathers sees the meat grinder through American eyes, while Letters from Iwo Jima takes the Japanese side. Paul Haggis wrote the script from the book by the corpsman's son, James Bradley. It is a story about how a person is turned into a symbol, and what is left of him afterward. Stream Flags of Our Fathers (2006) online on iFILM.