Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of our Fathers” is the bigger and more expensive side of a cinematic diptych, the other half of which is a movie in Japanese, to be released next year, called “Letters From Iwo Jima.” The latter tells the story of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese defender of Iwo Jima who knew his cause was doomed but fought on bravely, tenaciously, skillfully, and almost to the last man.

Apparently, heroism of this classic type is okay for the Japanese, but it won’t do for Americans. We only want the victim-hero, the one who has lately become the stock-in-trade of the Hollywood war movie.

That familiar figure is what makes “Flags of our Fathers” a bore. True, the scenes of combat are often gripping, but there are far too few of them. Most of the film consists of scenes set in stateside America in the spring of 1945 as three victim-heroes of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima go on a war bond tour.

The three — two Marines, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and a Navy corpsman, John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) — are engaging enough characters, but we see too little of them that’s not involved with the emotional after-effects of combat. In effect, they become their neuroses.

Their disillusionment, which naturally goes hand-in-hand with what we learned well after 1945 to call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, might not be so tedious if we hadn’t seen it so many times before. Traumatized soldiers who shed their boyish illusions of honor and glory and heroism are now even more routine in the movies than those illusions themselves were in the patriotic pictures of the 1940s.

We get it, all right? The American movie audience lost its innocence so long ago it doesn’t even remember what innocence is like anymore. You might almost start to wonder if it ever existed in the first place.

For the movie, the big problem is the ponderous and heavy-handed moralizing that Mr. Eastwood has made a habit in his late directorial career, at least since his Oscar-winning “Unforgiven” in 1992. In fact, the moralism of “Flags” is substantially the same as that of “Unforgiven” and boils down to the sort of “message”that Sam Goldwyn used to say ought to be left to Western Union: Killing people and watching people die leaves a man permanently scarred.

Yet it’s not all downside, either, since these scars also bring status. In particular, they admit the man to a freemasonry of grief and bitter experience that allows him to look down with a sort of pitying contempt on everyone who stands outside it. Of the civilians or stateside military men our three heroes encounter on their tour, only the parents of dead comrades are at all sympathetic. The rest are giggly or glad-handing ninnies.

They Just Don’t Understand! And so our victim-heroes are further victimized by being isolated from society by their experiences. Politicians, of course, come in for particular abuse. Even President Harry S.Truman (David Patrick Kelly) is made to look like an idiot.

The summit of idiocy comes as the three men are made to climb a Mt. Suribachi made of papier maché erected in the middle of Chicago’s Soldier Field and plant a flag on the top as a brass band plays patriotic marches, fireworks go off, and thousands cheer. “That’s show-business,” their handler, Bud Gerber (John Slattery), says cheerfully.

In the unlikely event you need to have it pointed out to you, this is supposed to be a very bad thing. Though he has been a director for 35 years and an actor for more than half a century, Mr. Eastwood apparently believes that putting on a show is a shameful thing — at least if it is a show about heroism. Heroism, for him, means suffering, not triumph or glory.

Well, it’s not an uncommon view these days, and no one would mind it too much if we had been allowed to take the moral or leave it alone. But Mr. Eastwood and his screenwriters, William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis (adapting the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers), apparently think we’re as dumb as Mr. and Ms. American Everyman of 1945 and need to be hit over the head with it again and again.

Most clumsily, as the three heroes stand on top of their fake mountain in Chicago and watch the fireworks go off, the film fades to an Iwo Jima flashback: The mountain becomes the real mountain, the fireworks become real bombs and rocketry, and the men become their former selves, terrified in the middle of a nightmare landscape.

This happens not once but twice, and there are literally dozens of other cuts back and forth between fat and fatuous civvy street and the allegedly real world of death and destruction that the men have come from and are unable to leave behind. Do you think these switchbacks are meant to tell us something?

If you’re anything like me, you will become dizzy and disoriented from so much needless shuttling between the two contrasting worlds.

Just as you start to be engaged by the scenes of battle, you find yourself back in the unfeeling civilian world, on a train speeding through the night with the heroes insisting they’re not heroes and feeling sorry for themselves.

Just as you’re getting as interested as you can in their post-combat and post-war lives, you are whisked away again to witness some fresh battlefield horror which (count on it) is going to come back to haunt them eventually. Lord knows, I don’t want to give the impression that I am ridiculing a movie that goes to such extraordinary lengths to show respect for those who have so bravely suffered and died. But I felt about it rather as I did about Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” that there’s such a thing as being too respectful toward suffering.

If we suppose, as some of us still do, that these men suffered for something — to wit, their country — doesn’t that deserve a little respect too? The country shown to us by “Flags of our Fathers” doesn’t deserve their sacrifice. And if their suffering is all they’ve got to show for it, I call that demeaning, not respectful.