Pointless, long, unlikable, and confusing

Rating: 2/10 (2 April 2020)

I would definitely recommend that those interested in watching skip this film.
Spielbergs' film imagines a grim colonial Shanghai, full of selfish and antagonistic individuals whose sinister traits are only exacerbated by the onset of war. I'm a history student and watched this for a paper I was writing over film in the British Empire. This film was long, meandering, and aimless. I have absolutely no idea what it was trying to say. Jim is an extremely annoying and privileged upper-class child of British colonists. I understand in part that this is meant to illustrate that he is extremely sheltered, but he fails to become more endearing as the film progresses, even as he gains more real-world experience.
Which brings me to my next point; no one in this film is likable. Basie is extraordinarily arrogant and rude, his affection for Jim feels entirely conditional, his dialogue feels anachronistic (lots of cheesy 80s cool guy one-liners), and his character ultimately feels pointless. The doctor and other characters who act as paternal figures for Jim are all cowardly or self-serving, or both. This is perhaps to portray how people become self-serving in times of war or disaster (which isn't supported by evidence; in times of disaster people are more pro-social), but it just makes everyone in the film unlikable and gives viewers no one to root for. Jim's parents are pretentious, underdeveloped, and it feels as if they have only the slightest affection for him.
The depiction of Chinese and Japanese people has not aged well, either. The Chinese characters in this film are depicted as ingratiating, subservient, or antagonistic toward the British. The Japanese (with the exception of one teenage boy who perhaps serves as an analogue to Jim) are depicted as bloodthirsty and uncompassionate warriors. While they were fascists who committed a number of war crimes during WW2, I still think their overall cruelty played up within this film.
This film felt like it was 30 or 45 minutes too long. There seemed to be no clear thesis or unifying purpose to the film. It's not even especially valuable historically, it mostly focuses on Jim's individual perceptions and experiences with war, but never seems to drive home a defined point about how war affects children or how they experience it, other than Jim acting downright irrational and bizarre towards the end.