Empire of the Sun

Rating: 3.5 Stars

Everything good about this movie is to be found in its main character, Jim, played by a 14-year-old Christian Bale. Christ, is this boy a good actor. He has a good 80 percent of the screen time and frankly I think that's 20 percent to little. He's energetic, he's natural, he's touchingly emotional; he grins, cries, crawls, yawns, and stares in character, and easily makes it to my top 3 favorite performances by a child. Perhaps number one.

As a historical movie, Empire also presents a fresh perspective. Frightened, huddled Westerners are herded about by powerful, corrupt Japanese, a pleasant reversal from Hollywood's tendencies to typecast minorities as history's victims. And frankly I learned a lot about the Pacific theater of WWII, Japanese occupation of China, and English internment.

I have one main visual qualm:

I love historical movies. I love artistic movies. I hate when the two are shoddily intertwined - key word shoddy. To illustrate, toward the end of the movie the camp survivors are ushered into an abandoned stadium full of looted furniture. They wander about, malnourished and frail, among these reminders of their former opulence. Visually it's interesting, but story-wise it's so devastatingly distracting, as if the movie expects bonus stars for being mysterious and artsy.


To illustrate this point, I turn to another one of Spielberg's war movies Saving Private Ryan, which perfectly blends cinematic beauty with visual historical honesty. While Empire gets it right most of the time (ie. the plane attack), the moments it doesn't are highly jarring.