Delayed Reaction: Empire of the Sun

Premise: A British boy gets separated from his parents while living in occupied China during WWII.

You can break Steven Spielberg's career into some neat phases. There's his Box Office Hungry phase from Jaws to Temple of Doom (1975-1984). Then his Oscar Hungry phase from The Color Purple to Schindler's List (1985-1993). His Dreamworks or "Victory Lap" Phase from The Lost World to The Adventures of Tin Tin (1997-2011). Finally, it appears he'll end his career in his Dad Phase, starting with War Horse (2011-present). There's some overlap to each phase and a few odd ducks in there, but it arcs pretty clearly. First he wanted the world to love him, then he wanted the Oscars to love him, then he had some fun, and now he's getting reflective. Empire of the Sun is in the thick of his Oscar Hungry phase. He got some early Oscar love for Jaws (not a director nomination though). He kept turning unassuming genre movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark into Oscar players. By the time he still couldn't win Best Picture or Director for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial - literally the biggest movie ever at the time - he started hunting the Oscar more directly. The Color Purple in 1985 I think still holds the record for most Oscar nominations without a single win. Always didn't make a dent in the Oscar race, but you have to assume he directed it with Oscar hopes. He finally got the Oscar with his masterpiece, Schindler's List*, which has become the totem for "Oscar bait" over the years due to how transparently it played to Oscar tastes. I don't even think it's a bad thing that Spielberg was hunting an Oscar so hard. By all industry logic, he should've won well before that. And, it's like an athlete competing for a championship. Once they have that, the pressure is off. It's a career release valve. After a win, there's no longer the whispers about if this is when it's finally going to happen before every movie. I think that's what makes his Victory Lap era so fun (and long). A.I.: Artificial Intelligence would've been a lot different if he needed that to win Best Picture. His first collaborations with Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn't've been breezy hits like Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. Schindler's List walked so The Terminal could run...OK, bad example.

*I'm not being glib by calling it a masterpiece. It's an incredible movie.

Before Schindler's List though, there was another WWII movie. Not 1941. We agreed not to speak of that one ever again. Empire of the Sun is a weird movie. It's sort of a survey of the war through one child's experience. Similar to The Pianist, 1917, or Saving Private Ryan. The movie plays more like a short story collection with the same character than a novel. What I love is that it does the thing that I ask from all WWII movies now: It shows me something different. I've seen Nazi concentration camps, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, and the front line plenty of times. I never even thought about British citizens living in China at the time of the war. This offers a completely different perspective, with locations I haven't seen before.

I couldn't figure out if a young Christian Bale was an asset or an impediment. On one hand, even as a teenager, it's incredible how poised he was. In hindsight, it's obvious that he was going to be a star. On the other hand, I couldn't stop seeing him as a young Christian Bale. That distracted me the whole time in a way the same performance wouldn't if the kid was never heard from again.

It's also interesting to think of why this movie didn't go all the way for Spielberg. It got a healthy nomination haul (6 nods, including Editing and Cinematography), but it failed to go all the way. Part of it has to do with bad timing. This was the same year that The Last Emperor, another historical epic set in China during the 20th century, won Best Picture. Also that year was Hope and Glory: a movie about a boy growing up in WWII London during the blitz. There was no way for Empire of the Sun to stand out. At that point too, Spielberg couldn't tamp down his "Spielberg magic". This movie still sees the world through a child's eyes, which is the same thing that got in the way of E.T.'s Best Picture dreams. You have to have an adult POV to win Best Picture. Plenty of movies get close with a child POV (Babe, for example), but voters historically always go the other way at the end of the day. Schindler's List finally won, because it had all of Spielberg's sentimentality but approached the story from an adult's perspective.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend