"Empire of the Sun" and "Saving Private Ryan"

Rating: Null/10 (22 July 2008)

William Goldman got it right when he called "Saving Private Ryan" a detestable piece of crap for people who enjoy balloons. It belongs with "Schindler's List" in the realms of children's film-making, which Spielberg tackled better with the Indiana Jones films, but which here is marketed inexplicably as "adult film-making", thereby denigrating that term and infantilizing further the adult genre.
Watching "Ryan" is an entirely passive experience in which we feel compelled to admire the artistry with which an entirely trite and simplistic, but also flattering and complacency inducing, "message" is instilled in the audience. There's something altogether sinister about propagating the idea that tyranny/evil is an alien and foreign characteristic.
All Spielberg's "serious films" are stuck firmly in the past. He takes a historical event which we readily recognise - some event with motifs, symbols, easily recognisable moments, images and values - and then spits it all back out at us. "Ryan" is Spielberg's "ultimate WW2 history lesson", summing up American's most basic understanding of WW2: WW2 was a noble war, Uncle Sam cares about his troops, General Marshall takes personal interest in every fallen soldier, the enemy are faceless, skinhead Aryan barbarians, American is good, Hitler is evil, the SS intended to enslave the world, America won the war, remember this, be good, patriotic and earn it.
But it's all a myth. WW2 was not a Good War nor was it fought on altruistic grounds. It was a war based on staggering hypocrisies and waged for old fashion Imperialist reasons. All wars need to be sold and WW2 was one of the most carefully plotted lies in history. But Spielberg reduces it to false myths; a series of recognisable signs and second hand iconography. Flags. Heroes. Death. Honor. Shut up and love your country.
Like Gibson's "Passion of Christ", this is a supremely evil film which asks us to exalt dead Christ soldiers for dying so that we may be free. Both films offer orgies of cruelty and suffering, bogus mythologies regenerated with techno-wizardry and masochistic point-of-view shots which serve, not to disgust us, but to celebrate the necessity of gore. This is sadomasochism as public-consumption spectacle, succumbing thoroughly to the Cult of the Military/Church. The Cult which says that Freedom isn't free, and that the cost of freedom is blood which must be periodically sacrificed on the altar of Liberty by the military/clergy. This kind of thinking tends to believe that we only have freedom because we are allowed it by the government/God, and that, not only should be grateful for it and turn an unquestioning devotion onto the government/military/church, but that when the "timeless call" (the name of another Spielberg propaganda piece) comes, we should be ready and willing to die.
The film's only function is for the audience to exclaim: "Look at those amazing special effects! Gimme more!" While its covert purpose is the jingoistic and chauvinistic regeneration of nationalist ideology, the very "evil" that the film's context was supposedly attempting to overcome. Couple this with the film's warped sense of civic virtue (ie: to be a true member of society, you must "be good" and earn your keep) and you have a pretty fascist picture.
"Ryan" pretends to be a realistic, morally nuanced film about the war, but in reality it's psychologically inauthentic slice of fascism. It's a character driven piece with no actual characters. It's a show reel of scenes stolen from at least 50 other war films (A Walk In The Sun, Beach Red, Bataan, Objective Burma, Guadalcanal Diary etc). End result, a couple of technically amazing battle sequences bookending two hours of propaganda. Simply shaking the camera does not equate to realism.
Far from "revolutionising the way we see war", "Ryan" adds nothing to our perception of war. There is nothing beyond the gunfire. Nothing to distinguish it from any war film released between 1943 and 1963. Ten years on and the film's sole effect has been to influence a series of next generation computer games which recreate the exhilaration of combat in this new, pseudo-documentary style. In some cases, entire scenes from "Ryan" are recreated as levels for kids to play. "Ryan" isn't war, it's just action. It's Spielberg playing with toy soldiers (Spielberg's first film as a kid was a playful war movie).
So make no mistake, this isn't realism. The real D-day landing was painfully slow and lasted countless hours. Combat is banal, mundane and always less seductive than its celluloid representation. What the film really "accomplished" was the successful marrying of the "pornography of violence", its unrelentingly brutal voyeurism, with extreme, pro-nationalist ideology. The audience responds by "enjoying" watching the film, never bothering to actually address the underlying fascism.
"Empire of the Sun" is likewise a cartoonish film for those who like balloons. Jim (Christian Bale) is a wealthy child who lives in war torn Shanghai. Spielberg touches upon a couple issues (class, fantasy, loss of childhood) but the main gimmick is that Jim lives in a fantasy world of comic book heroes and fighter jets and so is able to somewhat resist the horrors around him. His fantasies are only shattered when the illusion of his parents is confronted by reality. Jim's reunited with his family and is now safe from harm, but spiritually, he's dead. Unfortunately, Spielberg never commits to the bleakness of Ballard's vision. For Spielberg, what Jim's been through was only a consequence of mommy and son being separated.
Ignoring the fact that the film is saccharine, tasteless and that the musical score undermines every emotion, it's annoying to see how Spielberg romanticises the Japanese Army and portrays the Chinese (the historical victims) as a bunch of idiots. Watch how the Japanese Army never kill so much as a single person, implying that the worst of its conduct relied upon repossessing real estate and partially neglecting the medical and sustenance needs of westerners in captivity. Oh the horror.
5/10