Wildly overblown

Rating: 7/10 (7 September 1999)

Visually, an utterly stunning film. Spielberg mounts a fantastic cinematographic display, every shot beautifully composed. There's a sweeping score too, huge crowd scenes, dream sequences, the works.
And there's a fine story of a boy's loss of innocence, of how a
pampered rich kid learns to survive, becoming a wheeler-dealer who knows how many cigarettes will buy a potato or cabbage. Though not quite as brutal as military POW camps, surviving the Japanese civilian prison camps required courage and resourcefulness, and young Jim acquires and uses these qualities in abundance.
The whole trouble with this movie is that the story and the presentation simply don't match up. We have a little story of a young boy's determined little struggle against adversity projected on to the broadest of canvases. We don't need every scene to be a spectacular, to have a huge score to take every hint of emotion to absurd heights, to be invested with emblematic significance. Pairs of shoes, battered suitcases, bicycles - these objects are far too mundane to be the leitmotivs of Wagnerian opera, which is the epic scale on which Spielberg has built his edifice.
Spielberg can make good little films about boys - see ET, for example - but placing his little story in such a grand setting obscures the tale and devalues the majesty of the filming.
This is much less than the sum of its parts, and it could well irritate you beyond belief. During the last third of the movie, I
found myself snorting or expostulating at each yet more overblown set-piece purporting to be deeply significant unfolded.
The Empire falls resoundingly between two stools (one made of plain wood and the other richly decorated and upholstered in regal style).