Steven Spielberg has made some rather fantastic movies set around the time of the second World War, namely Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. However, those were not his first attempts to tell a story in that era. That honor falls to 1941, his attempt at screwball comedy. However, his second was Empire of the Sun, a coming-of-age drama about a boy in a Japanese prison camp in China, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by J. G. Ballard.
Empire of the Sun isn’t always remembered as much as many of Spielberg’s other movies, but the worst I can ever say about any of his movies is they might be dull, and to date, I’ve only said that about The BFG, and even then there’s usually at least one good scene. Where will Empire of the Sun fall?
Young Jamie (Christian Bale) is the son of wealthy Britons living a privileged life in Shanghai with his parents. There’s some talk that the ongoing, unofficial war with Japan might get worse, but none of the English seem to think too highly of that. Then the invasion actually does happen, and Jamie is separated from his parents. He falls in with some American scammers, Basie and Frank (John Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano), gets captured outside his own home, and ends up in a prison camp until the end of the war, surviving the only way he knows how, by learning how to along the way.
Spielberg was originally going to simply produce this movie for director David Lean before taking over the director’s chair himself. It shows. This is very much a Spielbergian version of a David Lean movie. Lean’s work, like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, shows large scale stories following characters through monumental events. That fits here, but with the Spielberg angle of focusing on a child’s point of view as he changes in ways he may not have personally expected, as seen in the subtle ways when Jamie finds taking things from the dead, initially distasteful but later rather practical. Jamie sees people he knows eating rotten food, getting beaten by Japanese guards, and later more or less abandoned.
However, Jamie manages to keep a rather optimistic attitude. He believes camp mastermind Basie is his friend, that the Japanese pilots-in-training are brave and heroic (something Ballard has said he did himself as a boy), and that somehow things may work out for him. It isn’t as if Jamie is blind to the death and disease around him–the English doctor in the camp is his tutor–but he still seems able to push his boyish pluck to the forefront and carry on despite everything happening around him. The end result is a movie that I can’t say is in any way bad, but it does feel like it may be pulling some punches.
Is it? My guess is not really. This is based off Ballard’s book, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, and it’s somewhere in Spielberg’s wheelhouse as a coming-of-age story. However, this is one that suffers somewhat by comparison. Empire doesn’t pack the same punch as the aforementioned Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan. Granted, those movies were made with a more mature audience in mind, and while Empire of the Sun is hardly a kid-friendly story, it likewise isn’t as hard-hitting as many of Spielberg’s later work. As a result, I find myself seeing Empire as less of a top tier Spielberg movie, from either before or after he won the Oscar for Schindler’s List and he started to make more R-rated serious fare, and it isn’t quite at the same level of his all-time greats. A part of me really thinks this would have come out much better had Lean directed it after all. The movie’s fine, Bale even as a child is a strong lead, but in the end, this is basically mid-tier Spielberg.
Grade: B
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