At one point in the film, the young Jim, played by Christian Bale, stands in front of a giant poster for Gone With the Wind. It’s a statement shot. This is going to be a big sweeping epic movie, it’s going to transport you as only cinema can. You will experience the British experience of WW2 in the Far East from the comfort of your cinema seat. The beatings, the hunger, the desperate struggle for survival.
This might have worked, only it doesn’t. On the whole it feels as though Spielberg has too much money to play with. We as an audience are far too conscious of the vast, Hollywood expense on show. This distracts us from focusing on the deprivations of being a POW in China. It feels like Spielberg wants to walk in the footsteps of Griffiths and Gance, but he can’t find the manual to tell him how to do it, as a result revealing the limits of the Hollywood project. Just because you can throw money at something doesn’t mean you’re going to get the public to empathise with the characters, or even understand what the hell they’re going through. Empire of the Sun is kiboshed by a dodgy script and an over reliance on a child actor who has no antagonist. One wonders what Wong Kar Wai might have done with this material.
As a side note. In the UK, the Hollywood/ Art Movie dichotomy is frequently set up, with the cards usually falling on the side of Hollywood, for reasons which are linguistic but also ideological. Spielberg, master of the box office, is revered. One wonders to what extent language is the real determinant in this debate. Of course, it’s erroneous to make a judgement on the basis of one film alone, but it is interesting to note that Empire of the Sun, really doesn’t hold up. The lack of narrative coherence is precisely the thing that ‘arthouse’ film is so often criticised for, but the script of Empire of the Sun is all over the shop and the whole project ends up feeling gratingly self-indulgent.
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