Although Schindler's List is generally thought to be Steven Spielberg's most personal film (it is his most accomplished), his 1987 epic Empire of the Sun is without a doubt the most "Spielberg-ish" of his catalog. Unlike Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun does not seem like much of a personal, emotional investment for the director - with the possible exception of the boy hero's awe and fascination of military aircraft. But the film is chock full of trademark Spielberg moments, more of them than Jaws, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind put together: crane shots, heavenly choirs, and shots that are so neatly choreographed that they almost seem to be making fun of Orson Welles. When young Jim (Christian Bale) is kicked out of the P.O.W. kitchen, collides with the rail, and staggers toward the camera, sticking his face in it, that's a Spielberg shot. Later on, when Jim is making his rounds through the internment camp, wheeling and dealing, taking something from and giving something to nearly everyone on the compound, and everything seems so tidy, even the messes, that's a Spielberg sequence. Whenever there's a horde of of people trying to get somewhere or another, and the camera rises from just a few feet off the ground to a dizzying height, showing the congested mass in its chaotic entirety, that's a - you guessed it - a registered trademark of the disgustingly rich, insanely successful, three-time Academy Award winning director-writer-producer Steven Allan Spielberg.

Which is not to say it's not a good movie - a concession that I'm sure will get my Spielberg-hating readers' undergarments in all manner of contortion. It's extremely watchable, not too sappy (the man's worst film is and will probably always be Hook), and it's graced by the charismatic and skilled performances of Christian Bale, John Malkovich, and a first-rate supporting cast, which includes Miranda Richardson, Joe Pantoliano, Ben Stiller, and Nigel Havers. And while the techniques of the Spielberg-o-matic tend to go against the grain of the source material (J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel), the power of the underlying story shows through.

The film begins in December of 1941, in Shanghai. Jim, who has lived in the British confines of that city all his life, simultaneously alien to the rest of China and the England from which his parents came, becomes separated from his mother and father while the three of them are fleeing Shanghai, following the Japanese invasion. Frightened and alone, he first tries to hole up in his family's mansion, operating under the illusion that they'll return for him. When that's no longer an option, he wanders out into the city, on the point of starvation, looking for food, trying to surrender to occupying Japanese troops (they laugh). He hooks up with con men Frank (Pantoliano) and Basie (Malkovich), and when the three make an abortive attempt to loot the abandoned British mansions, they are shipped off to a holding center for British and American civilians, and then to a large internment camp at Soo Chow, next to a captured airfield. Jim spends 1942, 1943, 1944, and a good share of 1945 in the camp, and while it is not pleasant, Jim learns how to survive and even profit, turning himself into a junior Basie and junior Sefton (the William Holden character in Stalag 17).

The film is divided into acts, and the acts are subdivided not into scenes but into moods - good things happening, bad things happening. Spielberg's skill in using tone, sound, music, and nearly every aspect in his cinematic arsenal to convey mood, emotion, and occurrence is masterful, if not always broaching the high water mark of subtlety. The volume and bass on everything is cranked up two or three notches, and everything is overbright, the colors oversaturated, as they were in The Color Purple. This sledgehammer approach to filmmaking is supposed to be excused by the fact that we're seeing everything through the eyes of a naïve, dreamy-eyed, and more often than not starving young boy, but that's not exactly true. We're seeing everything through the eyes of a naïve, dreamy-eyed, and award-hungry director, and this throws every two out of three nuances and effects into question. There is also the question of the surplus of sap - I objected mostly to the three consecutive scenes showing Jim bursting into tears.

But there are wonderful things. Spielberg's rendering of the period, the invasion, and the camp, is frequently breathtaking, even if, on the whole, Empire of the Sun is self-consciously epic, borrowing from David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille at every opportunity. At quieter moments, lyricism occurs. The film also features my favorite John Malkovich performance, as the deadpan (of course), wheeling/dealing Basie, top dog among the American prisoners (mostly downed pilots). And while there are many times when one can resist Spielberg's heartstring-tugging, it is a hard heart that is not moved by Jim's eventual reunion with his parents, who at first do not recognize him.

Empire of the Sun never really gets around to being about anything, and the narrative has no real push or pull. Such is the nature of biography, auto- or otherwise, but since Spielberg leaves his fat thumbprint on every shot, scene, and sequence, Empire of the Sun ceases to actually be a depiction of J.G. Ballard's internment, and instead becomes a heavy-handed Spielberg fantasy, as artificial as any computer-generated dinosaur or mechanical shark. The movie escapes from being a failure, but just barely; it is a testament to the positive aspects of the production that they manage to counterbalance the ludicrous, the too-clever, and the syrupy.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older