Near immaculately put together wartime tale about a boy winding up on a front-line of poverty and hard times.

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2012)

Empire of the Sun is a gruelling child orientated character piece which taps into a child's fear of isolation as well as going all out in being a thoroughly engrossing war drama with a keen eye on depicting the horrors such an event. The film will begin and end with that of a container, of sorts, floating easily along a water way. They are, however, two very different containers carrying very different things and yet are intrinsically linked by the fact that what they possess are effectively deceased and gone. Where coffins housing the dead line a river during the opening few shots, a small suitcase in possession of the belongings held throughout by that of a certain character is seen gently floating off and away; the image signifying times having moved on, that the 'old' character is gone and a new, more-exposed-to-the-world in ways which would have never normally happened, is here.
That character is Jamie Graham, played by Christian Bale; an infant initially living in the Chinese city of Shanghai just prior to Japan's attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbour and as a consequence, the majority of the Pacific's nations official entry into World War Two. He lives an affluent life with his rich parents, a blazer-clad boy singing harmoniously in a church when we first see him and later chauffeured back to a huge manor house in a neighbourhood firmly informing us of how he lives. What is more revealing, however, is the trawl home through the grime of some of the less desirable places native to the country; paupers and beggars, one of whom sits outside the property, sharing eye contact with Jamie in a reflective moment like they were from separate planets.
Jamie loves his aeroplanes, and upon finding a downed fighter in a field during a function some miles away, clambers into it so as to enthusiastically act out war-games as if the pilot. Said notion is often found in war films which mistake acts of warfare as processions of action, and thus ought to be shot or constructed as exciting when the harsh reality of the subject is that they're anything but. Spielberg's film is more a project depicting someone taken from their bubbled existence and thrust into a limelight of real wartime poverty and survival thus forcing reflection. Events cause the film to progress into what is essentially a prisoner of war movie, but a prisoner of war film keeping clear of sugar coating such a situation and doing well to maintain a sense of causality mired down in the turgidness and ugliness of a wartime scenario moreover the bouncy, joyous one more inclined to rear up when escape is the sole purpose of the film's exercise.
Once everything has happened away from where we are, and the Japanese have formally invaded this territory given their entry into the war, Jamie is separated from his parents in a street-set panic so returns to his home for a series of scenes shot as if the apocalypse has just happened or a nationwide epidemic has occurred forcing isolation and hiding. What is impressive is how the film goes about depicting Jamie's central transition, a film full of extended sequences and unbroken takes of young Jamie stumbling through a series of post invasion streets as he evades thieves his age and strives for aid in places he will not find it. In the background, things are blurred and the choice of angles at specific times are effective. Later on, things will appear to aesthetically 'normalise', as inceptions give way to a getting used to this newfound existence, it is through Americans Frank Demarest (Pantoliano) and John Malkovich's Basie; a seaman who lives out of a wrecked freighter in a harbour Jamie finds his feet.
When one thinks back to Spielberg's oeuvre, specifically from that of the 1980s, Empire of the Sun is not the film which immediately comes to mind, and that is a shame - although not as much as the fact that the likes of 1984's Temple of Doom might very well do instead. It slots into a canon of around the time, let's say beginning in 1982 with E.T. and ending with Hook in 1991, depicting children or even children being exposed to a rawer situation than what was already evident in their lives â€“ when the movies Spielberg is churning out aren't made with a childlike enthusiasm, he seems to be able to get into the lives of minors and pull off the depicting of their plights; plights which carry that uneasy sense of both adventure and awe at their finding themselves in an unparallelled situation in a far off place, but fear of what is essentially the unknown. In Empire of the Sun, Spielberg veers off and away into a depiction of such things more inclined to being as good as his tale of a young boy coming into contact with an alien in E.T. than he does explore the freewheeling emotions of a young boy caught up in an adventure akin to Indiana Jones' in Temple of Doom, or indeed any of the child characters in the aforementioned Hook. It is a well played, meticulously unfolded piece clocking in at two hours but without a moment that either drags nor doesn't feels somewhat unsettling.