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
