EMPIRE OF THE SUN
Comments by William Tsun-Yuk Hsu
Copyright 1987 William Tsun-Yuk Hsu
Much has been said in this newsgroup about Steven Spielberg and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, the film his admirers point to as his masterpiece. I was not a Spielberg hater before I saw EMPIRE OF THE SUN (but then I had not seen a Spielberg movie since E.T., when I was a much more naive movie watcher.) I came out of EMPIRE OF THE SUN really detesting Spielberg's idiosyncracies and excesses.
I'll only touch on the essentials. As usual I'll try to steer clear of politics ("It's a travesty of the word ideologue to call Spielberg one."-- John R.) I won't make any comparisons with the book, as I have not read it (though I'm familiar with Ballard's earlier work, which I've been told is quite different from EMPIRE OF THE SUN).
There are several scenes in EMPIRE OF THE SUN that I really liked. The crowd scenes in the beginning were very effective. The scene in the junk yard with the furniture and piano was brilliant.
But as a whole, EMPIRE OF THE SUN is a small-minded, blatantly manipulative movie. It drips with sentimentality and stock Spielberg/Hollywood images and situations, and clumsily tramples over its interesting moments with contrived histrionics. Several scenes have effective sound devices, but the movie drowns under a sea of saccharine strings and "transcendental" female choral music.
The beginning of the scene with the kamikaze pilots was handled skillfully, but Spielberg the arch-audience-manipulator takes over when the kid (Jim) salutes them and starts singing. Not only does he sing, but the song echoes through the POW camp, and by the time it becomes a female vocalist I suppose we're all supposed to be crying. (And of course Jim has to look like an E.T. kid, and have a Vienna Boys Choir-type voice. But that's a matter of taste.)
Spielberg even sabotages his own clumsy attempt at structure near the end. Jim is riding his bicycle in the abandoned camp (obvious reflection of an earlier scene where he was riding his bicycle in an abandoned house.) Of course Spielberg cannot resist another typically Spielberg-esque miracle when a canister of food falls through the roof, and we are treated to the typical Hollywood radiant "sense of wonder" shot of Jim's face.
Finally, there is no excuse for this movie to last 2-1/2 hours. Much of what happened in the last hour were non-essential action sequences or overlong, rapt contemplations of not very interesting images.
Obviously Spielberg is not an inept film maker. Some scenes in EMPIRE OF THE SUN are really effective (recall, for example, the scene where Jim tries to stop his former servants from plundering his house, and one of them nonchalantly walks over and slaps him). But it seems Spielberg will never pass up on the smallest opportunity to tweak at the collective heartstrings of his audience. And he doesn't seem willing to break free of the Hollywood vocabulary of stock images and characters (some of which he has created, it is true). Only the memory of several well-executed scenes kept me from walking out on this movie.
Bill
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