The Spielberg Series: Empire of the Sun (1987)
The director takes a major step toward maturity with this war epic.
Honestly, I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to Empire of the Sun, one of the few Steven Spielberg films I had, until recently, not seen (the next film we’re going to discuss, Always, might be the only other one).
Empire comes from an interesting place in Spielberg’s filmography. It’s in the decade after he made Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. and changed moviegoing. After that, the director made a very overt attempt to mature as an artist and court acclaim by making “grown-up” films, leading to a rocky period of inconsistent output that started with The Color Purple in 1985 and ended with Always in 1989; aside from a third Indiana Jones movie, he wouldn’t return to blockbusters until Hook in 1991.
Empire of the Sun received a mixed reaction when it debuted in 1987. It holds a respectable 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it only grossed $22 million in the United States; worldwide, it grossed $66 million. Not a horrible take for a drama, but nowhere near what Spielberg’s films often brought in. As such, it’s gained a reputation as an under-appreciated effort among its admirers, while casual audiences have largely forgotten it. I guess I can understand why it’s one I never visited until recently.
And yet, that’s a shame. Empire of the Sun is one of Spielberg’s most ambitious films. If it doesn’t quite reach the heights of late-70s/early ‘80s output — and let’s be honest, why would we expect a filmmaker to be able to keep that run up? — it foreshadows the director he would become.
A personal story
Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun tells the story of Jim (Christian Bale), a young British boy living with his parents in Shanghai in the early days of World War II. When the Japanese invade and Jim’s family attempts to evacuate, he’s separated from his parents and eventually winds up in an internment camp. There, the formerly privileged young boy becomes a survivor, smuggling items to fellow prisoners and currying the favor of American smuggler Basie (John Malkovich). Through the years, as Jim begins to lose hope of seeing his parents again, we view the war and its devastation through his eyes.
Spielberg’s previous film, The Color Purple, was a respectful but overall misguided effort to court prestige. There’s a lot in the movie that I like, particularly the performances by Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. But overall, it’s an ill fit for Spielberg, who both shouldn’t have been the person to tell the story and was not at a place in his directorial career to handle the film’s bleaker subject matter, resorting to pratfalls and big emotional hooks whenever the material got too serious.
Empire of the Sun may be Ballard’s story, but it automatically feels more in line with ideas Spielberg has explored throughout his career. Told from a child’s point of view, it mixes the innocence and wonder that are his hallmarks with more mature themes of war and coming of age. Parental separation and shattered families are, of course, also dealt with throughout Spielberg’s filmography.
Perhaps most strikingly, the film finally gives the director permission to engage with World War II on a serious level. The director had always shown a fascination for the conflict, but throughout his previous films it was either dealt with in a way that allowed for outsized villains in Raiders of the Lost Ark or treated as comedy in 1941. In Empire of the Sun, Spielberg deals with World War II in all its seriousness, placing his characters in the midst of the danger and devastation. He’d return, of course, to the war throughout his career, most notably in Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
Spielberg’s epic
I don’t know why, but I always assumed that Empire of the Sun was one of Spielberg’s smaller films. I knew its protagonist was a child and that the majority of the film took place in a prison camp. In my mind, this was a small, intimate piece the director had worked on after The Color Purple before jumping back into adventure with Indy.
The fact that David Lean was initially interested in directing this should have clued me in to how wrong I was. Empire of the Sun stretches over years, and there are multiple scenes that I have to imagine were challenging for even a director as familiar with scope as Spielberg to handle. The evacuation of Jim and his family from Shanghai is a massive crowd sequence, where Spielberg both ably conveys the overwhelming chaos the young boy is caught up in while also ensuring that we know exactly where everyone is and what is happening. While Spielberg had handled intricate stunt and special effects sequences before, Empire of the Sun is his first to have large-scale battle scenes and moments handling hundreds of characters. The big-ness of Spielberg’s early films is often treated as a detriment, but here it’s an asset as he tells a story whose impact depends on having such a large canvas.
But Spielberg doesn’t lose the personal in the sprawl; the key is that everything is told through Jim’s eyes. Working from Tom Stoppard’s screenplay, the story follows Jim as a privileged wealthy boy, obsessed with Japanese fighter planes and oblivious to the seriousness of the conflict unfolding just miles away. There are brief shots where he sees a beggar outside his home and we get a glimpse of how he’s lived untouched by any hardship. We view life on the streets and in the camps through his perspective, and are with him as he begins to shed the innocence of childhood and become more detached and proficient at survival.
Loss of innocence
Spielberg has often been criticized for his perceived Peter Pan syndrome (he’d literally make a Peter Pan film just a few years later), seen as an entrenched refusal to mature. I don’t think that’s quite fair. Jaws is an intense and primal thriller, and Close Encounters’ awe-inspiring climax comes at the end of a film about obsession, near-religious fervor and familial abandonment. Even E.T., which is explicitly about childhood, marries its story of friendship to one of divorce and the very real devastation of death. Innocence survives in Spielberg’s films, but it’s not aloof of the world’s harsher aspects, even if Spielberg occasionally veers too sharply into sentiment for his own good (the major misstep with The Color Purple).
Empire of the Sun is a loss of innocence story, and the first film where Spielberg feels comfortable engaging bleak material. Jim initially views the war through a child’s eyes, even getting excited when he sees one of his beloved Japanese bombers wreaking havoc. He forms a wordless friendship with a Japanese pilot outside the camp. He’s excited about being able to help Basie smuggle items in and out of camp, eventually garnering enough favor to leave the family barracks where he’s been placed and stay with the more exciting American men.
And yet, Christian Bale, in one of the most skillful child performances I’ve seen, ably captures just how separated Jim becomes from his old life. Rather than a bright-eyed kid alone and afraid, he becomes a survivalist, scurrying around camp to help his fellow prisoners and keep himself busy. On a dare, he risks his life just to win a bet. He grows from a precocious kid to a young man well aware of the harshness of life; in one of the film’s bleakest passages, he endures a death march with fellow prisoners.
Spielberg didn’t seem quite ready to handle The Color Purple’s starker themes of incest and abuse, tossing in inexplicable physical comedy and saccharine emotion. But in Empire of the Sun, he embraces the harsher material more ably. There’s a maturity to it that was lacking in his previous film, and there are several sequences that are among the most haunting and memorable of his career. There’s a surreal stadium in the desert filled with wealthy people’s seized cars and artworks that ends in a moment of haunting tragedy. A moment with a couple making love amidst the bleakness of a bombing run is possibly the first mature expression of sexuality in Spielberg’s filmography. A sequence where American bombers conduct a harrowing raid on the camp turns horrifying as Jim’s excitement at seeing the planes becomes mania, endangering his life and culminating in one of the film’s most heart-rending moments. Then there’s the moment where Jim sees the atomic bomb blast from a distance, one of the more beautiful and horrible shots from all of Spielberg’s filmography.
And yet, Empire of the Sun is not a slog. There’s a sense of wonder and adventure, even among the horrors of war, mainly due to Spielberg and Bale’s ability to tell the story from a child’s point of view. It’s not just that Bale is a capable actor, even at that young age; it’s that Spielberg also finds personal moments to latch onto in telling the story. The director has long had a fascination with World War II aircraft, which he formerly indulged in both 1941 and Close Encounters. Passages of this film center on Jim’s love of aircrafts, with the young boy pausing in the chaos just to catch a glimpse of one of his favorite vehicles. When he has the opportunity to lay his hands on one a plane, Spielberg and cinematographer Allan Daviau create a gorgeous, almost romantic moment.
All that, plus a cast that also includes one of Malkovich’s finest roles as the charismatic but self-preserving Basie, as well as a sniveling young Joe Pantoliano (watching this while also going through The Sopranos season 3 was interesting) and an even younger Ben Stiller. It also has a typically rousing and lush score from John Williams, complete with a choral arrangement that ranks among the best of the Williams and Spielberg collaborations.
Empire of the Sun may not have the originality and imagination of Close Encounters or the naked emotion of E.T., but it’s remarkable as a solid attempt at Spielberg to meld his larger-than-life approach to something more grounded and mature. Even if he can’t help but indulge his sentimentality in a final shot that undoes some of Jim’s hard-won growth with an “everything will be okay now that momma’s here” moment, the film still works remarkably well (and in A.I., Spielberg would eventually deliver this moment without the saccharine leavening).