Good points. I would like to see a current movie depicting the evils of the Japanese atrocities. However, as the writer admits, the soldiers at Iwo Jima may have been quite different. This seems especially plausible since we're talking, essentially, about the end of the war. Perspectives may well have changed and "humanized." It's also possible that the available human material in the later stages of the war for losing armies -- Japanese and German -- was younger and/or gentler, losing armies have to reach further and further into the available pool to keep up their manpower.
It was an excellent movie and could have been much more relativistic than it was. It could also have been anti-American, and wasn't. I don't think it conveyed a message about the pointlessness of the war from an American standpoint, but rather conveyed the increasing pointlessness of Japanese resistance, and the human side of the Japanese soldiers.
It would be interesting to hear from someone who actually knows what the Japanese on Iwo Jim were like.
I saw the movie and I liked it. I didn't accept the premise that the enemy was just like us.
I understand that the Japanese troops on Iwo Jima were the cream of the crop and the toughest the Japanese had. No old men and young kids like Hitler used in Berlin.
When I watched it, I kept thinking it would be a good double bill with "Downfall", the German movie about the last days in Hitler's bunker. Both had that sense of "we're all going to die."