Every few years, a movie will come along to reinvigorate people’s interest in war pictures.  The film will be so extremely well made, nobody will argue over it merits or any political stances it may or may not take en route to what will certainly be a lucrative year-end awards season.  These pictures will represent the high water marks in the filmographies of the respective directors, as well as new standards of excellence in terms of presentation of dramatic battlefield action sequences.

Fathers is not one of those films.  It’s not even close, actually, but thanks for playing.  In terms of recent Pacific Theatre flicks, it ain’t much better than John Woo’s instantly forgettable Windtalkers, which is more than a little ironic since both pictures share the same vapid lead (Adam Beach).  Fathers is the first part of a two-picture presentation from Clint Eastwood, who shows the Battle of Iwo Jima here from the American perspective, and will release Letters from Iwo Jima (from the Japanese POV) next February.  Maybe Fathers will magically seem less slapdashy once you’ve seen Letters, but I doubt it.

“The right picture can win or lose a war,” and Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima took the route of the former while Dubya can tell you how things work when Abu Ghraib drags you down the latter.  If you thought that sentence was confusing, the first 10 minutes of Fathers will probably blast the top of your head off.  Viewers will be whipped around to different locations in different eras before they even begin to start looking for their bearings.  And it’s not even done in a cool, poetic way like a Guillermo Arriaga screenplay might be.

Eventually, you get to the proverbial money shot, when American troops start charging onto the black sandy shores of Iwo Jima (played here by Iceland), but don’t get too settled just yet, Chief.  See, the bulk of Fathers isn’t about the 35-day Battle so much as it is about the ensuing publicity tour the three surviving photograph subjects (Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, and Beach) are forced to endure in an attempt to increase sales of war bonds.  Eastwood occasionally drags us back to the Pacific for a flashback or two, but none pack enough of an emotional wallop that they couldn’t have been shown in order.

Essentially, Eastwood is painting two tapestries – the Battle, and the publicity tour – and neither of them work particularly well.  Attempting to combine them in a non-sequential fashion finds even less success as Fathers lumbers towards the end zone like a 300-pound defensive end with a fumble recovery (and you know he’ll need a big hit off of the oxygen mask afterwards).  Of course, there will still be a large audience for Fathers because it’s based on a real story, and it’s patriotic to boot.  If you trash a patriotic film based on a true story, the terrorists have already won!  Even if it’s, you know… not that great.

What little we do see of the Battle looks simultaneously breathtaking and terrifying (if they remind you more of Saving Private Ryan than anything Eastwood has ever crafted, you won’t be surprised to learn Steven Spielberg serves here as producer).  Unfortunately, the herky-jerky story pulls you in an out of the action with a ferocity that will leave you unsatisfied, and the non-battlefield scenes will literally light up the theatre as people check their text message inboxes.

1:32 – for sequences of graphic war violence and carnage, and for language