Spielberg at a Crossroads

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2002)

***Spoilers ahead***
This is a forgotten Spielberg movie, and with good reason. While the cinematography is outstanding, as you would expect, the plot is directionless, the characters are unsympathetic, the history and setting is grossly distorted and the multiple serial-endings are downright aggravating.
While the first 75% or so of the movie is moderately enjoyable, the scenes following the American bombing of the internment camp (when Jim is up on the roof screaming at the planes) are interminable. There is one build-up after another to a huge emotional crescendo that . . . never . . . happens. The most meaningful of those moments comes, of course, at the very end when Jim is reunited with his parents, but by then the emotion has worn so thin that the impact (or potential impact) of that scene is totally lost.
Beyond that, Jim's frenetic ramblings and meanderings throughout the movie are inexplicable. They can't be attributed to mental illness or shell-shock wrought by his circumstances, because they begin very early in the movie (such as when he starts nattering about contract bridge after Frank has rescued him). This makes Jim a very unsympathetic character, and we end up not caring if he lives or dies by the end of the movie, much less whether or not he sees his parents again.
While I have many other beefs with this movie, most of the comments have been made elsehwere so I won't repeat them. However, I will add that I was particularly irritated by the Basie (John Malkovich) character, which is a direct plagiarization of William Holden's character in "Stalag 17" or "the King" in "King Rat" -- two vastly superior movies, I might add, about similar subject matter that "Empire of the Sun" doesn't deserve to be mentioned with (although I just did).
So, what happened here? My only conclusion is that Spielberg made this movie at the crossroads of his career -- from making outstanding action / adventure / fantasy movies that were oriented towards a younger audience, to making outstanding fact-based movies oriented towards an "adult" (if you will) audience. "The Color Purple", two years earlier, was part of this transition (and was a slightly, though not much, better movie); "The Last Crusade" (an excellent movie) was another part of it. In "Empire of the Sun," Spielberg seems to have tried to accomplish both -- an adventure of a child set against the background of the Sino-Japanese conflict in WWII -- and he ends up accomplishing neither.