Before I walked into the screening for Letters from Iwo Jima, I called my brother on unrelated business. At the end of the conversation he asked me what I was seeing. I told him, and added in a grim tone, “so I have about two and a half hours of War Movie in front of me.” He sympathized. “It’s a Clint Eastwood movie, too, so it’s not exactly going to be bursting with action,” he said. I was okay with that. Seeing The Last Samurai, Cold Mountain, and the unending war porn festival that was Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in the span of one week may have burned me out on epic battles for all time. I could stand for something a little different.

Letters from Iwo Jima is, thankfully, something a little different. The Japanese forces doomed to make their last stand on that island fought from the mouths of dug-out tunnels in the mountainside, so there are very few Big Sweeping Shots of amassing forces and men clashing by the thousands. Japan was an aggressor in World War 2, so there aren’t a lot of homespun speeches about signing up to defend what’s right and true. These soldiers were drafted, some at gunpoint. And they’re almost certainly going to die, for no good reason at all.

So replace the overbearing sentimentality of your typical World War 2 movie with restrained melancholy. Remove the big battle scenes and instead add a series of intentionally disorienting events inside endless, dimly lit tunnels. Take out faux-humble nobility and give us characters who simply do what they feel they must do, despite how they may personally feel about it. There are no soft-focus flashbacks. There is no mental game of picking who’ll die based on what their hopes and dreams are.

In short, Letters from Iwo Jima is a war movie that doesn’t behave like a war movie. The film is almost disarming in its straightforwardness; it does not try to charm, or cajole, or oversentimentalize. It simply documents the violent struggle and eventual end of thousands of lives. But even that impending doom is muted; death is coming, but getting portentous or crazy about it won’t stop it coming. They have to get on with things.

And maybe that’s why Letters from Iwo Jima resonates on an intellectual rather than emotional level. It’s interesting. Fascinating. Even a little heartbreaking. I hesitate to use the word “powerful”; the emotional pull necessary for that kind of response can’t be found among so many characters slowly resigning themselves to fate. Watching the losing side of a great war realize it’s losing is a sobering experience, but not one that yields a lot of tears.

But maybe that’s fine. Maybe a movie that eschews the conventions of the Western war movie should jettison the expected emotional payload. The greatest sin Letters could commit is to be superfluous, to be yet another World War 2 movie written and directed by people too young to have fought in it. It is instead necessary, even vital. If it doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, maybe that’s all right. Maybe we could do with a little less Hollywood in our war movies.