A powerful tribute to JG Ballard

Rating: 9/10 (22 June 2012)

Being a reader of JG Ballard can only enhance your enjoyment of this film. I'd venture the opinion that this may well be the reason why this movie didn't hit the highs expected of it: Tom Stoppard took care not to over-narrate the film through dialogue or deliver a conventional narrative, choosing instead to craft something that acts as a deeply felt tribute to the peculiar genius of JG Ballard. I honestly can't see how anyone who doesn't read Ballard can truly get what this film is driving towards.
In other words, it is a story about the formation of a deeply odd artist. A man who revelled in the concept of violent collision as the presiding principle of our universe: the collision of man and machine made possible through the motor engine; the collision of cultures; the collision of old and young, male and female, sane and insane, sadist and erotic; the collision of fiercely opposed world views; the collision of natural beauty with ugliness and sadism.
Ballard was all this, and more. To get at this, there are worse places to start than 'The Empire of the Sun' itself. However, this is possibly his most conventional book. He left it until very late in his career to fictionalise the disturbing oddity of his childhood, and it reads a little as if the material he uncovered was almost too powerful for his established style as a novelist.
If you read 'The Kindness of Women', its sequel insomuch as it fictionalises his adult existence, you get a great insight into how the war shaped Ballard's aesthetic. Sharper people than I have defined this, so I will simply say that it revolves around shocking juxtapositions, be that of image or emotion. He's a past master of delivering deeply emotional moments with a disturbingly clinical eye.
Read Spielberg's opus through this lens and you will get its peculiar genius. I salute it as a terrific collision of image-maker and writer.