Empire of the Sun

Tom Stoppard is a great scriptwriter, for both stage and screen. He has been nominated for eight Tony awards for best play, with shows such as Acadia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as well as an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love. This script however, based on J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel by the same name, does not live up to that lofty pedigree. In fact, I would go so far as to say Empire of the Sun isn’t very good and the story, and therefore the script, plays an outsized role in how disappointingly poor the movie is.

The main engine of the film is ostensibly the coming of age of the central young boy: Jim, played by an early career Christian Bale. Jim starts the film as the spoiled son of oblivious English aristocrats living in British controlled Hong Kong, surrounded by Japanese occupied China. As tensions mount and eventually break, and the Japanese seize Hong Kong from the British, the family makes plans to evacuate and then get split up in the process, leaving Jim alone to fend for himself on the streets of the city. One might expect this to begin a journey toward self discovery, maturity, and a certain degree of adulthood. Instead, however, Jim starts the film as a relatively unlikeable little weasel and remains a relatively unlikeable weasel throughout.

Jim’s only defining characteristic is his myopic love of planes. In the beginning of the film, he loves and respects the Japanese because they have the coolest and best airplanes. For most of the second act, Jim drifts through the war, and the story, as he has no desires of his own (other than to survive) and so only acts reactively to the wants of others. There is a brief period where he shows potential for growth, situated around a desire to find where he fits in with the people of his eventual internment camp, but this never really goes anywhere… or at least not anywhere that rewards the viewer for their investment. In the third act, despite suffering fairly terrible atrocities while under the thumb of the Japanese, the way that the film frames Jim’s exuberance over his impending liberation by the Americans is bizarre, rooted not in freedom and salvation but in a hero-worship for the now superior American fighter planes.

The movie seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. It wants at times to present a child-like lack of understanding or detachment from the great drama of war, seeing it through a skewed lens and with a degree of ambivalence. But it also wants to show how Jim, and others, are put through the ringer as a result of war, which by its traumatic nature cannot help but have an effect on the kid as he lives through it. There are times when the movie seems to be wanting to make a grander philosophical point or position Jim to do or say something with a greater meaning, but the lead up to and pay off of these moments never makes them land correctly. How do you anchor a piece to a protagonist that is so seemingly disconnected from what is happening in the world around him? Is he a scrappy survivor, a reminder of our innocent humanity in a time of inhumanity, or a rich kid who has never known strife being ill equipped to face his current circumstances? The movie can never really decide, and so it trips its way through the story without giving much of a narrative hook to catch and keep the audience’s attention.

With no idea what to do with Jim and his character, and with little time or effort given to the traditional maturation and growth of a coming of age story, the movie can often come across as little more than trauma porn. There isn’t much of a story other than a connected series of events that ask us to experience the travesties of the Japanese occupation vicariously through the characters on screen. Not only can we experience the acute suffering of Jim, as the protagonist, but also the suffering of so many that he comes across, from the malnourished refugees at the holding cell in the city to the abuses of the labor camp to even the tragedy of the (sometimes very) young Japanese men sent to suicide their planes, there is plenty of sadness to go around. But this isn’t actually good storytelling. In the classical sense, of characters having wants and then working (whether successfully or not) to overcome the barriers that stand between them and those things, this movie is weirdly lacking. The most common refrain is that of character apathy (giving up, letting themselves waste away, etc.) against the intolerable cruelty of the circumstances and, generally speaking, apathy doesn’t film well.

That being said, a certain amount of credit should be given to Spielberg and his cinematographer for nailing the visual language of the film. The streets feel dirty and desperate, the camp dry and unforgiving. The “grand adventure” of the kid’s saga is engagingly captured, in terms of bringing the audience along for the ride as things both wondrous and horrific happen to, and around, Jim as he does his best to survive the Japanese occupation. However, this visual storytelling is ultimately in service of such a muddied and difficult to enjoy story that it becomes easy to overlook the solid directorial work for all the film’s other faults.

Ultimately, the film has a fairly great premise, a stellar creative team behind it, and a lot of potential, but it just never seems quite able to get off the ground; further proof that there are no guarantees when it comes to making art.

Would Recommend: If you are deeply curious about how the Japanese treated their non-military prisoners during World War II.

Would Not Recommend: If you want a coming of age story where the protagonist actually matures into their adulthood.