It's About Time

Rating: 9/10 (2 April 1999)

When I first rented and watched Empire of the Sun on video about 10 years ago, I was so moved by the performances and the story that I: first, went out and bought the video so I could watch it again and again; and, second, moved the movie into my top-ten all-time favorite list. Christian Bale (who will be hardput to exceed his acting accomplishment in Empire in the 60-odd years he has ahead of him as an actor) and Steven Spielberg (one of a kind) combined to give an extraordinarily rich picture of an awful and devastating war through the eyes of a maturing, but still quite young, boy. So it was disappointing, though perhaps not unexpected, that the conventional wisdom of the time dismissed Spielberg's work here as rather shallow; afterall, the critics had been predisposed to think of Spielberg in that way. Silly of them. It is only in the light of Schindler and Private Ryan that critics have begun to appreciate Spielberg's insight, vision, and directorial skills. Now the critics are beginning to look back at works like Empire to find the seeds of these more recent films. Bull to the seeds! Empire of the Sun stands on its own, not as a film that possesses seeds for other more "mature" works, but as a brilliant film in and of itself -- a brilliance that reviewers were too blind and too prejudiced to recognize at the time (and they PAY these people). Shame on them! And great for us! Spielberg, we know, has done tremendous work with Schindler's List, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan. These are all exceptional films. But his truly pioneering work, and the film that ought to be his signature work, is Empire of the Sun. It is still a movie I will watch again and again, and it remains safely and securely among my top-ten -- the critics be damned (though their quest for forgiveness and redemption has not gone unnoticed)!