{"id":2705,"date":"2005-07-16T11:57:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-16T11:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/07\/empire-of-the-sun\/"},"modified":"2005-07-16T11:57:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-16T11:57:00","slug":"empire-of-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/07\/empire-of-the-sun.html","title":{"rendered":"Empire of the Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>


It may be a testament to how impressed I was with Batman Begins<\/a><\/i> that I have begun digging up earlier films by the guys who made that movie. A few days ago I finally got around to watching director Christopher Nolan\u2019s first film, Following<\/a><\/i> (1998), and then yesterday, I borrowed Steven Spielberg\u2019s Empire of the Sun<\/a><\/i> (1987) from the library because I had not seen the film since it was brand new and I wanted to go back and remember what Christian Bale was like when he was first starting out as a child actor.<\/span><\/p>\n

And gadzooks. Having seen Bale undergo such drastic physical transformations in his more recent films \u2014 from the rather buff star of American Psycho<\/a><\/i> (2000) and Reign of Fire<\/a><\/i> (2002; my review<\/a>) to the alarmingly skeletal star of The Machinist<\/a><\/i> (2004; my comments<\/a>) and back again to the buff Dark Knight \u2014 it\u2019s interesting to see how he has transformed, and yet remained utterly himself, in a more natural way, from childhood to adulthood.<\/p>\n

Despite seeing the film only once, I did buy the soundtrack<\/a> way back when, and I listened to it a lot<\/i> about 10-15 years ago. It was interesting to hear those themes again, and in film order rather than album order, and to see the visuals that go with them.<\/p>\n

And gosh, what visuals. They\u2019re almost too<\/i> good, in fact. I was 17 \u2014 half my age now, come to think of it \u2014 the other time I saw this film, and I remember thinking it was full of beautiful visuals and striking symbolism but I wasn\u2019t sure what it all meant. FWIW, echoes of those thoughts still pass through my mind; some images are just so jaw-droppingly good that they take me out of the movie. You are so aware of Spielberg trying to impress you that you lose sight of what\u2019s supposed to lie beneath these gestures.<\/p>\n

The I-miss-my-mother stuff and composer John Williams\u2019s use of the piano, especially in the early scenes, are like a premonition of A.I. Artificial Intelligence<\/a><\/i> (2001; my BCCN review<\/a>; my CT review<\/a>; my Vancouver Sun<\/i> article<\/a>). And the way society goes nuts and people suddenly become selfish and Bale has to live on his own in the family home \u2014 taking advantage of the opportunity to break social conventions by riding his bike through the dining room, etc. \u2014 bring to mind the apocalyptic overtones of more recent Spielberg films like War of the Worlds<\/a><\/i> (2005), albeit in a milder form. And of course, the World War II setting and the boy\u2019s fascination with airplanes are right up Spielberg\u2019s alley.<\/p>\n

There is some interesting God-talk in this film, as there is in many of Spielberg\u2019s films. Near the beginning, when everything\u2019s still cozy, Bale suggests to his mother that God lives in our dreams and we live in his; shortly afterward, he tells one of his father\u2019s friends that he\u2019s an \u201catheist\u201d. Then, near the very end, a character happens to die moments before an A-bomb goes off on the horizon, and Bale thinks it\u2019s the character\u2019s soul going up to heaven; when he hears later on that it was only a new kind of bomb, he describes it as a bright light in the sky, \u201clike God taking a photograph.\u201d<\/p>\n

(And is there any spiritual significance to the song that Bale sings in the choir at the beginning of the film \u2014 a song that is reprised at several points later on? Are the lyrics available anywhere, I wonder? FWIW, there is also another song that plays over the closing credits \u2014 and in a few of the earlier scenes \u2014 in which the singers appear to repeat the word \u201cHallelujah\u201d a fair bit.)<\/p>\n

I had completely forgotten that Joe Pantoliano (who had played a bad guy in the Spielberg-produced The Goonies<\/a><\/i>) and Ben Stiller (!) play John Malkovich\u2019s sidekicks in the internment camp.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to think that this film made less money than any other movie in Spielberg\u2019s career<\/a>, even after adjusting for inflation, with the sole exception of his theatrical debut, The Sugarland Express<\/a><\/i> (1974). There have certainly been worse films in his ouevre. But this film came out at a time, between Indiana Jones<\/a> sequels, when Spielberg was not yet recognized as a \u201cserious director\u201d \u2014 if anything, his previous film, The Color Purple<\/a><\/i> (1985), while a box-office hit<\/a>, may have convinced some people that Spielberg was a popcorn-movie maker who was merely posing<\/i> as a \u201cserious director\u201d \u2014 plus its thunder may have been stolen by The Last Emperor<\/a><\/i>, which, like Empire of the Sun<\/i>, prided itself on being one of the first Hollywood movies produced in the People\u2019s Republic of China, and which was released at almost exactly the same time, and which went on to sweep the Oscars.<\/p>\n

The whole thing of a boy enjoying himself during the war was also a prominent theme in John Boorman\u2019s Hope and Glory<\/a><\/i>, which was also released that year \u2014 and that<\/i> film was directed by a man who actually lived<\/i> through the war \u2014 so who knows, that might have also contributed to Empire of the Sun<\/i>\u2018s seeming redundancy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may be a testament to how impressed I was with Batman Begins that I have begun digging up earlier films by the guys who made that movie. A few days ago I finally got around to watching director Christopher Nolan\u2019s first film, Following (1998), and then yesterday, I borrowed Steven Spielberg\u2019s Empire of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEmpire of the Sun<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It may be a testament to how impressed I was with Batman Begins that I have begun digging up earlier films by the guys who made that movie. 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