Lavishly mounted, but lacking sympathetic leads

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 2017)

Steven Spielberg's wartime epic, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard, is an exploration of life under Japanese colonial rule in China during the Second World War and just before it. Like many of Spielberg's worthy movies, it's a little overlong and sluggish, a little idealistic, and certainly far too sentimental for its own good, failing to particularly portray the true suffering and nastier aspects of the situation. However, it's also refreshingly unbiased, presenting the Japanese as a real people and culture rather than the usual demonised enemy you typically see in Hollywood productions. EMPIRE OF THE SUN is certainly a lavishly-mounted movie, well photographed throughout, but it suffers from some real flaws, not least the lack of sympathetic characters. Christian Bale does very well as the lead, but there's no getting over the fact that his character is quite insufferable.