From the opening frames of the film to the last scene of young Jim's (Christian Bale) eyes slowly closing, "Empire of the Sun" is a masterpiece in film making. This film should be regarded as the most visually stunning film of all time. Steven Spielberg, in his infinite wisdom, has created a film of such beauty and sadness, that can not be compared to anything.
Combining a serious plot with incredible visuals, a beautiful screenplay adaptation by Tom Stoppard, a fantastic cinematography by Allen Daviau, a wonderful art direction by Frederick Hole and an incredibly emotional musical score by John Williams, Spielberg has created the most unique and heartbreaking war film. It is a great movie for those who study the mechanics of film. Everything is totally convincing. This is how to make a historical film.
Spielberg does things nearly impossible in film. He has combined a spectacular with a highly personal film, even mixing them in the same scene. The scene in which Jim gets separated from his parents in a veritable ocean of fleeing humanity is both emotionally moving and immense. This is a film filled with one strange and vivid incident after another, one memorable scene after another, yet one never feels there is too much frosting and not enough cake. This film proves that somewhere underneath the highly commercial director is a man of great artistic talents that all too rarely get used. It is incomprehensible that the director of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" also directed a film of the sensitivity of "Empire of the Sun."
For those who seek simple entertainment, "Empire of the Sun" is an opportunity to live a lifetime of experience in a short three hours of film. A constantly inventive film conveys a sense of wonder about flight and a whole lot more. The plot is lightly sketched, but this in no way detracts from the simple joy of watching an amazingly crafted work. Perhaps the full three hours of film is not justified for the plot, and some extra cutting could have been made, but the rich texture would have suffered. The memory of well-executed scenes certainly kept those who could not sit long from walking out. It can only be a work of true genius.
The film at times reaches a dreamlike quality, such as in a scene near the beginning of the film when the British residents are all being chauffeured to a costume party through mobs of terrified Chinese fleeing the Japanese, or another beautiful yet eerie scene of a stadium filled with looted furniture, statues, and valuables. Such scenes are not inordinately or pretentiously dwelt upon (or worse, recalled through flashbacks), and after the film is over are among the more vivid and lasting images.
The movie is always interesting from a narrative point of view and Spielberg is a good storyteller with a good tale to tell. His story, based on the autobiographical novel by J. G. Ballard who lived through a similar experience as a boy in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, is mounted on a gigantic scale; set in and around Shanghai, it gives us a whole society in tumultuous upheaval. For Spielberg to work on an expansive canvas is nothing new, but his attempt to ground his story emotionally and give it real psychological weight is. With "Empire of the Sun," Spielberg has made an epic that retains its human dimensions.
Spielberg's adaptation is hypnotic, often mesmerizing cinema, the most inventive and challenging movie of his career. Had Ballard not written his novel Spielberg might have been forced to, because the symbolic meaning of Jim's saga so close to his heart. Not only do we have the familiar Spielberg theme of a child searching for his parents, but we also have the motif of the magic above reality - the escape mechanism into a more perfect world, a world that may be represented by visitors from another planet, or time travel, or hidden treasure. This time, it is the world of the air - and airplanes. Fundamentally, the story is a tragedy about the end of childhood. And for Spielberg, this may be the essential theme, the essential tragedy.
"Empire of the Sun" seems somewhat superior then "Hope and Glory," a film with a vastly similar theme. "Hope and Glory" relied on subplots involving trivialities as affairs between Sebastian Rice Edwards and the other characters. In "Empire of the Sun," such filler is avoided. Each scene does its bit to influence Bale's character and to add enlightening detail to the mood of the film.
Ballard's original was a pretty tough piece of work. But Spielberg likewise does have either the inclination or the stomach to merge with Ballard's vision of starvation and rotting death. And it's as if he looked into the heart of his grown-up material and flinched. "Empire of the Sun" is perfect for Spielberg's Peter Pannish purposes.
Spielberg was so true to the novel that you can even pick up the most minute details in the film. The minute attention to detail that fills each scene was impressive, as was the historical accuracy. Such small items as a British silver half-crown with George VI or the insignia on Jim's school uniform, as well as larger ones such as each character speaking a believable language, adds an admirable layer of accuracy and a very fine texture to scenes that are already wonderfully composed.
The attention to details in the composition of each scene is a joy to watch. From a cliche'd opening view of water in Shanghai harbor that is suddenly rudely interrupted by floating coffins that are in turn shoved aside by a Japanese patrol boat to some of the most frantic and eerie crowd scenes, the film doesn't settle for casual ways to portray an event. The effect is nothing but a masterpiece.
Probably what first attracted Spielberg to Ballard's novel was sentences like these: "Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city; in the foyers and department stores and hotels the images of Dunkirk and Tobruk, Barbarossa and the Rape of Nanking sprang loose from his crowded head."
This excerpt is typical of Ballard's surreal, almost hallucinatory prose, and it demonstrates the difficulty inherent in translating his one-iric narrative into effective cinema. How do you dramatize onscreen a story entirely from the perspective of a child with a hyperactive imagination? Without making the whole experience of war look like one big hallucination? Without making the child himself seem psychotic?
Well, Spielberg doesn't worry about any of that. He just lets his visual imagination run wild, lets the story become more and more surreal, bizarre, fantastic, and removed from "reality" and "naturalism." Until finally we realize that combat IS a surreal experience, war DOES feel like a hallucination, a collective psychosis, and the antitheses of daydream and nightmare, realism and surrealism, cannot truly be distinguished. Particularly when the main character is only 12 years old.
Critics who challenged this simply forgot that the film is told entirely from the perspective of a cerebral, precocious, but also dreamy, fantasy-prone child. Jim Graham (the "J.G." in J.G. Ballard) does not fully understand what is happening around him! The unique thing about "Empire of the Sun" is its point of view. It shows us war through eyes of an innocent child, whose life is forever changed and ruined. This unique perspective allows us to see war differently.
Jim processes the information almost as a painter or artist would: in terms of loud noises (B-51s, marching regiments, voices in the darkness), vivid images and brilliant primary colors (an exploding Japanese aircraft, a vast billboard of "Gone with the Wind", autumn leaves swirling in a swimming pool, the white light of an atom bomb), everything pure sensation. Detractors seem to want the 12-year-old protagonist to process information as a 40-year-old-man would (one possessing middle-of-the-road, middlebrow liberal sympathies). What they deride as emotional immaturity on Spielberg's part is really emotional accuracy.
For that matter, why did so many "Empire of the Sun" detractors admire "Titanic," which turns the whole massive tragedy into a convenient backdrop for a cheesy Harlequin romance plot, replete with bonehead dialogue and loads of mindless gunplay?
Spielberg's child-like (not childish) approach is even more appropriate once you know something about the author, J.G. Ballard. Just as "Hope and Glory" gave us insights into the roots of John Boorman's love of fantasy, "Empire of the Sun" more than explains why Ballard writes science-fictional mega-disaster novels in which we see how titanic, world- crushing events affect common people's lives. Ballard is an acclaimed science fiction writer, but what's fascinating about his science fiction is that it's hardly fiction. The recurring motifs of his books—drained swimming pools, humid wildernesses, gleaming aircraft, rotting corpses—seem directly inspired by his childhood in wartime.
Yet there is an attraction, an exhilaration latent in Ballard's descriptions. Ballard has said his experience in a prison camp wasn't entirely negative, he wasn't unhappy. Yet Spielberg was chastised by some for depicting his child hero as frequently quite happy! Surely that was the point. The adult characters (played by John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, and others) seem quite unhappy, often deeply miserable and despairing. It's only Jim—precisely because he is still a child—who's often upbeat and cheerful. Perhaps the only thing that cuts against the credibility is that it is difficult to believe so many beautiful and enigmatic incidents could have happened to one boy.
Christian Bale, making his screen debut as Jim Graham, was acclaimed by the best reviewers: Pauline Kael, David Denby, David Thomson, and specially Andrew Sarris. Sarris, called Bale's performance the best performance by a child actor he'd ever seen. This sounds like hyperbole, but it's not: Sarris is merely accurate. Bale was certainly not carefully filtered by Spielberg from more than 4,000 other hopefuls for the role for nothing. He has an invisible technique: he doesn't "perform" in the stagey, artificial manner deployed by most child thesps.
Jim is a schoolboy with a very believable obsession: flight and airplanes. It is easy to believe this obsession with flying would strike a responsive chord in Bale; it does so in every dreamer. His big concern is building airplane models and studying aircraft. His ambition is to join the Japanese military, not for political reasons, but because they have planes. Day and night, the boy dreams of flying. He knows the names of all the airplanes and can spot them by their silhouettes. When they fly overhead in Shanghai in the last days before World War II breaks out, they may be an ominous omen for his parents, but for him they are wondrous machines, free of gravity, free to soar.
Jim has led a sheltered life. His father became wealthy in the textile industry in Shanghai in a European community incongruously identical to one that one might find in Britain. Thus they are a wealthy British family who enjoy a life of great luxury in Shanghai, a life in which limousines hurry them through the crowded streets to business meetings and masquerade balls and they hardly need notice the ordinary people in those streets. Sometimes the Chinese press too close to the car, sometimes they hold up traffic, but mostly they are simply invisible.
Jim was prone to daydreaming -- until war breaks out, and the boy's whole world is shattered. Nonetheless, his childish imagination, as we soon see, is both a blessing and a curse after the invasion of Shanghai. A blessing because it initially shields him from the horror of what is happening. A curse because eventually the horrible truth breaks through his defenses, and he's too smart and sensitive a child not to be damaged. This is why David Thomson declared "Empire of the Sun" as the scariest cinematic depiction of the warping of childhood innocence by experience.
It can not be denied that despite the film's caliber, most young people who saw the film were more interested in the fact that Christian Bale was in it than what the film was about. They had no idea what it was about or how it would effect them. The end result: Bale's performance brought everyone to tears. Never has anyone seen his age or older give such a performance. It is not often you see a boy act with such power, vulnerability and total understanding of his character. Bale delivers without a doubt the strongest performance in the film. He has remained, not just a pretty face, but a true jewel in the craft of performing.
In retrospect, leading reviewers are bewildered by the acclaim heaped upon Bale's overexposed contemporary Leonardo DiCaprio, when it's perfectly obvious that what Bale does here (at age 12) far surpasses anything DiCaprio has so far shown he is capable of projecting.
When the Japanese invade Shanghai, Jim flees with his parents to sanctuary, but in the midst of a panic-stricken mob and he is separated from his parents. One moment his mother has him by the hand, and the next moment he has dropped his toy airplane and stooped to pick but when he rises to his feet, she is gone, separated by 5,000 frightened people. Spielberg draws an extraordinary reaction from Bale here, as fear mounts into panic, and panic dissolves into tearful hysteria.
The scene where Jim returns to his house, tries to stop his former servants from plundering his house, and one of them nonchalantly walks over and slaps him is unforgettable. The house, now silent, empty, devoid of life. The atmosphere of these scenes is difficult to describe: "Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue, as motionless as the wall of dust that hung across the rooms, briefly folding around Jim when he walked through the deserted house."
Spielberg could not have done Ballard's imagery any better, Images of what? Of footprints in the dust of a bedroom floor, gone with the wind from an open window. A drained swimming pool filled with falling autumn leaves. A silent house littered with scattered dishes and toppled furniture: the home as museum; or Shanghai as modern Pompeii.
Jim survives for weeks on his own, living of the food left in his and his neighbors' abandoned mansions. Desperate for food, he's later taken in by Basie (John Malkovich) and his sidekick, Frank (Joe Pantoliano), a pair of American merchant seamen who scavenge the area for whatever loot they can find. Initially, they plan to sell Jim, but there are no takers (he's too skinny), and eventually the three of them are captured by the Japanese and imprisoned.
"Empire of the Sun" has the largest British cast ever assembled for an American movie. They are all solid and believable. John Malcovich manages to create a believable character in Basie -- a combination of Fagin and King Rat -- he negotiates the lanes of supply at the camp, both official and unofficial, with an enviable shrewdness and savvy. Joe Pentaliano is convincing as Basie's buddy and Nigel Havers is strong and understanding as Dr.Rowlings, who becomes like a father figure for Jim.
But Spielberg has not forgot the Japanese. A Japanese boy that becomes Jim's distant friend on the other side of the fence, is extremely important to the story. They save each other in several life threatening situations. This relationship is suddenly ended when the boy is shot by one of Basie's friends. When Jim cries out: "He was my friend… he gave me a mango!" Basie replays: "He was only a Jap." In the aforementioned rebirth section, Jim will attempt to revive him. "I can bring anyone back," he insists.
This story could have been told prosaically, but there is little prosaic about "Empire of the Sun." With Ballard's, Stoppard's, and Spielberg's imaginations creating images there is nothing stereotypic about this film. The characters are all portrayed believably. Despite its theme, the film comes across neither as brutally depressing nor mindlessly uplifting. Some of the Japanese guards are at times brutal, yet none are strictly seen as villains, and the film could never be seen as an anti-Japanese film. It is amazing that such a story could be told of conflict and suffering, and yet there is not a single villain and every character who speaks is fresh and new. Spielberg does not show the Japanese as cold-hearted bastards, but as human beings like Jim and the rest of the prisoners. There is a sense-of-wonder observation of the Japanese--bringers of planes to China--and of the Americans who build the huge "Cadillacs of the sky."
Most of the film is set in the Lunghua prison camp, where Jim is forced to grow up under horrible circumstances. His experiences as he loses his family and is forced to fend for himself in a Japanese prison camp are wondrously textured. The 12-year-old child is standing on the brink of insanity and some of the films strongest moments are when Jim tries to explain to himself the meaningless situation around him, and how the insanity of war affects him.
The scenes that follow focus on the traumas that Jim and the other prisoners must endure, and they're meant to emphasize Jim's suffering. Instead, they demonstrate Jim's resiliency and indomitable energy. Jim is a quick learner. Short, fast and somewhat invisible because of his youth, he has the run of the camp. He knows all the shortcuts and all the scams and steals to survive. He still dreams of airplanes, and as the months go by, he dreams less frequently of his parents and finally cannot quite even remember their faces.
Spielberg portrays the prison camp as enclosures where the jailers embody cruel authority while somehow permitting the heroes to raise hell and have a relatively good time. Spielberg allows the airplanes, the sun and the magical yearning to get Jim's way. Very much like Sebastian Rice Edwards in "Hope and Glory," Bale shows that young boys can even enjoy war, up to a point. Christian and Sebastian are virtuoso performers, and virtuosity can't be dismissed. They have the uncanny ability to turn horror into nostalgia.
Though "Empire of the Sun" is a profoundly perplexing, there are things in it to marvel at and enjoy. And there are smaller moments -- like the scene in the camp hospital in which a young woman dies, and then, momentarily, seems to come back to life and stare Jim right in the eyes -- that are as complex as any Spielberg has ever directed.
Who will forget the panic in the streets of Shanghai at the beginning of Japanese invasion? The frightening contrast between Englishmen driving in their limousines to a party and thousands of Chinese desperately trying to get out of Shanghai alive? Who will forget Spielberg's artistic and visually stunning picturization of the atom bomb? After the bomb goes off, the sky is filled with blue and white waves, so you can't see where the sea ends and the heaven begins. And while Jim's face is blinded with the white light, he whispers: "… like God taking a photograph." In both of these scenes and many more throughout the movie, Spielberg shows us that he is a master of contrasts, combining mortal danger with visual beauty. Absolutely astounding.
Among the other moving scenes in the film, is one involving Japanese kamikaze pilots. The scene arises unexpectedly, and is masterfully handled to bring across the full tragedy and glory of the event without trivializing the emotion. One wishes that it would be further dragged out, but the scene that follows arises perfectly and is itself wondrous as well. There's a fevered anxiety in these scenes. Spielberg creates a more poised and watchful mood, almost a state of suspended animation. And that only heightens the suspense.
There is another moment, where Jim creeps outside the camp by hiding in a drainage canal and escapes capture and instant death not because of his wits but because Spielberg forces a camera angle -- placing his camera so that a person cannot be seen who would be visible in real life. And then the inevitable moment when Jim, having a spontaneous moment, is so passionately associated with a huge telephoto image of the sun. Spielberg once more allows everyone to pay homage to huge celestial orbs -- the sun of "The Color Purple" and the moon of "E.T."
Of course Spielberg cannot resist another typically Spielberg-esque miracle when a canister of food falls through the roof, and all were treated to the radiant "sense of wonder" shot of Bale's face.
Spielberg accelerated his momentum in the third act, in the closing scenes of the camp and after the release of the prisoners, who spend the final act of the film wandering like Moses in the wilderness. From this point on, we get a series of surreal images, all beguiling in the conflicting emotions they bring to the surface. The scene in the junk yard with the furniture and piano was brilliant. Spielberg was wrongly criticized for superficiality here, but this is not a fair assessment.
Ineptitude, though, is hardly Spielberg's crucial flaw: If anything, he suffers from a surfeit of talent. There isn't a moment in the film that is blandly or routinely directed. And in some of the film's big set pieces, especially his staging of an American attack on a Japanese airfield, you feel his technical mastery in every frame, and the sheer raw energy he packs into his compositions can make you feel breathless, intoxicated by motion and speed.
Finally, the war ends, and Jim is reunited with his parents under the shadow of nascent Chinese communism. Much of what Jim experiences was shocking, and Spielberg neither embellishes nor understates Jim's experiences. Flies, death, and decomposition are everywhere, as are avarice and (occasionally) kindness.
"Empire of the Sun" is deep and emotional, displaying Jim's life through his own thoughts and feelings. At the same time the historical parts are not forgotten. There are a lot of philosophical questions and moral dilemmas that question the essence of war. The film has a strong grounding in war history. Many people lack such knowledge.
Films like "Empire of the Sun," "Hope and Glory," and "Schindler's List" will make these people understand the meaning of war. But most of all, "Empire of the Sun" conveys a tremendously emotional experience about childhood lost in the horrors and insanity of war. War experiences are brutal, painful and tragic, but sometimes they call up the best in human beings. And after the war is over, the survivors eventually began to yearn for that time when they surpassed themselves, when during better and worse they lived at their peak.
"Empire of the Sun," is in many ways, Spielberg and Bale's most personal testament. Too much of the film has been conceived as a showcase for their brilliance. Compared to other Spielberg war films, it has more unsettling in its implications than "Schindler's List," and it's also vastly more inventive and more daring than "Saving Private Ryan." A triumph of Hollywood grandeur.