EMPIRE OF THE SUN [1987] review

It is always nice when a movie turns out to not be at all what I was expecting, but I still like it.  Such is the case with Steven Spielberg’s EMPIRE OF THE SUN, a movie that long bounced around in my head as one to see, but took a couple decades to actually make onto my playlist.  Maybe most surprising of all was that the lead character (a young British boy) was played by Christian Bale.

I knew EMPIRE was about Japan somehow, but my first surprise was that it was not set in Japan.  Then toss in an entertaining and ludicrous fancy party in the middle of a military escalation, and it is hard to get a grip on what this movie is going to be about.  EMPIRE settles into being a story about survival and doing what it takes to survive, be it absolutely whatever it takes in the case of John Malkovich’s character, or be it almost absolutely whatever it takes with Bale’s more ethical young man’s morals.

Surviving does not seem so bad through the eyes of the young Bale.  It’s only when the camera pans outside of his vision do we get the full impact of the situation.  However, I was glad for Bale’s view because it also allowed for his enthusiasm to keep the movie from being too bogged down in despair.

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