Unfairly neglected and despised - not least by me

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2001)

I adored "Empire of the Sun" when I first saw it. I was seventeen; I had only recently discovered how some movies could grow, looking richer and better on repeated viewings, and I fully expected this one to, as well.
So naturally I was disappointed when, instead of growing, it shrunk. The streetwise American proved to be a fairly stale character - he began to look as if Spielberg was simultaneously reaching for the cynical American in "The Bridge on the River Kwai", and Han Solo, and failing to grasp either. And the central character, I noticed, undergoes a hell of a lot: war breaks out over his head, he loses his parents during an outbreak of mass panic, he nearly starves, he's imprisoned by the Japanese and rescued by the Americans - and what, then, is the moral of it all? That people change. The story is a good deal less interesting than I first took it to be.
Well, I now realise, so what. It's not the film's fault that I first saw it when I was seventeen. The whole may be less than the sum of the parts, but the sum of the parts is a pretty big sum. There's that wonderful extended sequence, which lasts from when Jim loses his parents until he (and I admit that this part is a turn for the worse) meets the American: for a while it looks as if Spielberg cannot set a foot wrong. The way he returns to his old house and haunts it like a ghost. The way one of his old Chinese servants stops packing, methodically walks over to him, slaps him across the face, and then resumes her packing. It was the most economical way of getting through to the boy, it needed to be done, she'd wanted to do it for a while - and having done it ONCE, she could now move on to other things. The latter stretch of the movie, while disappointing, continued to serve up moments like these. The cinematography is a delight throughout, and not just because these are pretty pictures. Spielberg uses flawless images and cold, starry music to distance us from the scenes of war and privation and death and this is, I think his finest achievement: the whole film takes on the quality of vivid memories of things that cannot now be altered.
Apparently David Lean tried and failed to turn J.G. Ballard's book into a film - and indeed it looks as if Spielberg, too, tried and failed to make a David Lean film. But Lean soars so high there's plenty of room for others to fly beneath him without crashing. It may be the influence of Lean that makes the best film Spielberg made between "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Schindler's List". It's a far better study in war than "Saving Private Ryan". That film is as cheap and unsubtle as can be: it shocks us with blood and guts, then wears us down with inane spoken platitudes. "Empire of the Sun" lets us conclude the nature of the horror, and draw lessons, for ourselves.