If you flip over Flags of Our Fathers, you get Letters from Iwo Jima: Clint Eastwood reverses his story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the American point of view to that of the Japanese. Where a single war film usually lacks in emotional scope — siding with one nation and making the other faceless — Eastwood’s two-for-one snaps together both sides of war’s human drama. He undercuts the jingoism that is the genre’s stock in trade, getting instead at the universal moral dilemma of soldiers fighting for their country and not for themselves.

Eastwood’s camera delicately tracks Japanese soldiers through the bases and tunnels set up by the Imperial Army on the island of Iwo Jima, coming in for close-ups of their eyes that fade into wistful flashbacks of personal histories. Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) is a foot soldier for a cause he doesn’t believe in. When recruitment officers arrive at Saigo’s home, a woman greets his wife by saying, “Congratulations. Your husband is going off to war.”

For Saigo, Japan has already lost. American air force strikes against Iwo Jima are filmed as if from the eyes of a confused soldier on the ground. Bombs drop quickly, erratically and ruthlessly. Everyone scrambles for cover, knowing they don’t have a reasonable defense. If Japan’s strategy is hopelessly suicidal, the new general hired to take control of Iwo Jima, Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), dares to adopt American practicality. He asks soldiers to fight intelligently, and not to run headlessly into death.

You know Eastwood is penetrating, not recreating, the past from the vantage point of the present by the narrative ploy that sets up both Flags and Letters. Flags re-examines a legendary piece of American war propaganda, while the archaeologists who open Letters mine Iwo Jima for soldiers’ letters that offer a personalized glimpse into Japanese history.

Cultural specificity is important to Eastwood, who plays filmmaker-as-anthropologist. He is as much interested in the ideas of honor and heroism saddled on soldiers as in exploring their national identity. The famous American photo “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” informs the charcoal-like cinematography of both Flags and Letters, but in Letters the aesthetic feels just as much rooted in the iconography of the movie’s respective Japanese culture. The ashen faces, black sand and pastel blue sky recall Japan’s long history of desaturated print art. Audiences will grumble about Eastwood’s insistence on filming in Japanese, but this is also key to his mission: He examines the country’s misguided war effort on its own cultural terms.

All of this is to say that, in a Hollywood bent on superficially violent thrills, Eastwood’s moral depth is bracing. He is a humanist and a realist, all-embracing in his empathy and uncompromising in his honesty. Screenwriter Iris Yamashita sometimes hammers home his ethical principles a little too literally, but he and Eastwood also show stunning narrative grace. With one line, they usher in a contemporary understanding of patriotism as oppression: A stone-faced commander tells his squad before the Battle of Iwo Jima, “We earnestly hope you will fight honorably and die for your country.”

The quote captures Eastwood’s sensible war critique, a mix of absurdist satire and dead-serious conservatism. A less wise director would thoughtlessly lambaste confused military honor, but Eastwood knows better. By the end, Saigo arrives at patriotism on his own terms. He rejects the tyrannical suicide orders of his higher-ups but reaches out to the needs of his fellow soldiers.

The contemporary relevance is not lost on Eastwood. American troops in Iraq are expected to complete their work like machines, but Eastwood feels their horrors. These wars were started by governments, not citizens, and a soldier’s code of honor is his own. General Kuribayashi echoes important advice to Saigo: “Do what is right, because it is right.”