Film Review : Empire of the Sun (1987)

Against my philosophy of life, Spielberg's films always seem so dead and uninteresting; watching one is like viewing coloured patterns on the screen and nothing much more. When this process is made on the semi-autobiographical book of one of my most seminal authors, the effect is quite seriously disorientating.

The main theme of the Spielberg-led story of this film is of a boy losing his parents, losing his innocence, then finding his parents again. The parental bond comes totally to the fore, and this is so, so wrong in terms of the book. The parents in the book are the typical 1930s upper middle class family where the offspring are brought up by the nanny. There is considerable distance between the parents and the offspring, that to make this bond the central part of the film is just totally out of context of the period. Spielberg just didn't get this English cultural fact.

Right at the start of the film things depart from reality - the nanny for the boy is a chinese woman. This again is just so wrong and it made me spend the first ten minutes annoyed by this fact. In the book the nanny is a Belarussian, Olga. It is important that there is a separate layer of staff coming between the Chinese and the English. A Chinese woman would never have been allowed to have such direct and important contact with an English boy. I felt annoyed as this simplifying move was clearly made to dumb-down the story for an American audience.

The secondary theme of the loss of innocence is out of place here also. The narration of the book clearly indicates that this is an adult recounting his childhood through adult eyes. There is no rite of passage or moment when the narrator loses his innocence. The entire narrative is made from the point of view of an adult, and this 'journey' does not form part of the story.

Other annoyances include the waste of a good many decent actors' parts. Miranda Richardson just drifts around the screen looking wan, Robert Stephens gets very little screen time, Leslie Phillips is there but only occasionally. Only John Malkovich and Nigel Havers have anything interesting to do, and they do it well - a surprise for Nigel Havers who has had most of his career on the small UK screen.

Spielberg of course cannot resist an occasional descent into the mawkish - the Japanese teenager in the adjoining airfield and his subsequent death being the worst example.

Christian Bale's performace I have no problem with. The talent he has shown later on in his adult career is there to be seen. One can almost imagine the lead character in American Psycho being an adult version of the boy in the internment camp.

For the things that I did enjoy - one moment gave me goosebumps, and that was the attack on the airfield by Mustangs, and the realisation of the part of the book when the boy is standing on a building and sees an American pilot wave at him as he flies past. It almost got the hallucinatory feeling that J.G. Ballard described in his book. The scene set in the abandoned stadium where the Japanese had stored all the valuable furniture and cars from the westerners was suitably surreal, as was the sequence set in this arena where the flash of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki is depicted. In this book this is clearly figurative rather than factual, but the hallucinatory rendering of this event and the tieing of it to the death of Miranda Richardson's character worked.

The final scene of the reunification of boy and parents, and the closing of the boy's eyes in the arms of his mother is the required happy end to the story. What I really missed from the end of this story as was described in the book was the torture and death of the young chinese youth by the four bored Japanses soldiers - an event that clearly changed the life of the real J.G.Ballard and an event that resonates through all of his writing. This is the most likely event that caused the loss of innocence in the book's author, though the actual moment when he loses innocence is probably many years later, after his children have left home. Anyway, this is the sequel of the book which I am sure will never be made into a Hollywood movie. These days it would be staggering for the BBC to make a mini-series out of it, even.