Empire Of The Sun

Whatever merits J.G.Ballard’s autobiographical novel about a young English boy (played by Christian Bale in his first major screen role) who is separated from his well-to-do parents when the Japanese take over Shanghai during WWII may have had are well and truly lost in Tom Stoppard’s banal script and Spielberg’s expensive but uninspired rendition of it.

Spielberg may be exorcising his arrested development issues but the result of making a pre-teen boy the heroic centre of a film about life in a Japanese POW internment camp is so tediously saccharine (not a little assisted by the John Williams schlock-drenched score) as to alienate adults and so unexcitingly handled as to offer nothing to children. A running time of two and a half hours only rubs salt in the wounds.

Whilst the production is superb, particularly the recreation of war-time Shanghai, the film is too sanitized to have any grip on our attention. A 13 year-old Bale gives a sterling performance but it is not enough to carry a film lacking in any dramatic depth. John Malkovich's character of Basie, a scurvy hustler, is the closet it comes to providing some kind of emotional dynamic but as Basie is essentially a narrative stereotype nothing comes of it.  Empire Of The Sun often looks splendid but it is all staging and no substance.

FYI: J.G. Ballard makes a cameo early in the film, dressed as a Beefeater, whilst Ben Stiller sporting some very bushy eyebrows appears intermittently towards the end, should you happen to endure that long.

 

Want something different?