Jim Rockford doesn’t sound like his mellow alter-ego at all. More importantly, he doesn’t sound like he’s actually SEEN the movie in question.
The Japanese are portrayed as (essentially) crazed cultists, at a national and individual level. The hero of our story–the one who humanizes the Japanese–is shown as an aberration, along with one (or two?) high-ranking official, and they’re under constant scrutiny and threat of death from others, living in a society that completely controls the flow of news, and where people chastise (or report!) each other for anything that suggests they might achieve less than full victory.
Also, the technique of booby-trapping corpses is shown.
There is one scene in “Iwo” where one American soldier kills a Japanese soldier who has surrendered (after managing to escape his own people trying to kill him). It’s not portrayed as an admirable thing, but the two guys have the option of sitting around waiting to be ambushed, or killing the guy and moving on. That hardly strikes me as an act of “horrendous evil”, and is the worst thing I can recall any American soldier doing in either film.
Just like I don’t think you could walk out of FOOF without appreciating the value of propaganda, I don’t think you could walk out of LFIJ without realizing that little short of an A-bomb was going to get the Japanese’s attention.
Unless, I guess, you thought US involvement in WWII was of no value. (There are people like that of course but Eastwood surely isn’t one of them.)
