This a a story of loss. Loss of empire, both British and Japanese and of innocence, of the character played by a young Christian Bale, who turns in a superbly nuanced performance, uncommon amongst thirteen year old actors. Born of empire but not of England we see the main protagonist, Jim played by Bale admire, what is the Japanese war machine, mostly their airforce. This does make one feel somewhat uncomfortable but due to the complete lack of British or any other allied military power in the region, it is the only military role model he has. Perhaps this underlines, that we are products of our immediate experience and not some codified ideal written in tablets of stone. The film is long at two and a half hours; though directed by Spielberg, I doubt very much that even he, would get away with that today and it would probably benefit from some judicious editing as many of the latter scenes add little value to the message of this film. Seeing this film at the cinema, thirty years ago as a callow youth, I would have been surprised that the young actor Bale, would become an international super star but having seen it for the first time since, tonight; I wonder with such a performance, how could it have been otherwise.

I stumbled across the existence of this movie just a couple of months ago, 30 years ago after its release. I'm not quite sure how I missed it back in 1987 but based on a score of 7.8 on IMDb and an overwhelming number of its reviews including the word "masterpiece" I was determined to seek it out and mentally prepared for a mind- blowing experience. I was therefore delighted to find it in the "classics" section of the movies on-board a recent international flight. It is not often that movies fail from the first frame, but this one did, literally. It begins with an overlong shot of some dirty water, some petals appear, then some pieces of wood, which in time turn out to be a number of wooden coffins. We zoom out to see a Japanese warship collide with them. So ends the first 2 or 3 minutes of this movie, showing a ridiculous situation which adds absolutely nothing to the story. We might be thinking, OK, well, the director has satisfied his ego and got the arty, gratuitous shot off his chest, now on to the real movie. But, alas, it was not to be so. The "plot" of this movie, and I use that word generously, is the picaresque meanderings of an obnoxious little boy to become an obnoxious slightly older boy over the period 1941 to 1945. This consists of a non-stop string of the most ridiculous, contrived, unnatural, laughable episodes you might have the misfortune to imagine. I made it to an hour and 20 minutes only because I could just not believe what I was seeing - it was, in its own masochistic way, fascinating, like watching a train crash. I will not bore you with the details of particular absurdities, but I am confident that if requested I could make a minute by minute itemised list of cringe-worthy examples. I was somewhat incredulous to find that this movie was based on a well respected "semi-autobiography" (whatever that is) by J.G. Ballard. That surely means that in its original form it had some redeeming qualities and that the author was not in fact anything like the ridiculous character in the film. Surely, hopefully, there has been a titanic "loss in translation" somewhere in the movie making process. I do not know if J.G. Ballard, Tom Stoppard or Stephen Spielberg is to blame but the screenplay is beyond execrable. It is as if it has been written by someone raised in a cave by wolves whose only knowledge of humans is from reading books. No man, woman or child I have ever known has acted, or spoken the way EVERYONE does in this movie. To say that EVERY character is a caricature would be an understatement, they are caricatures of caricatures. The Chinese are caricatures. The British are caricatures. The Americans are caricatures. The Japanese are caricatures. I also did not realise until after watching the movie that the "boy" was acted by Christian Bale. This I found astonishing as there are not so many movies about the 2nd Sino-Japanese war, the only one I know being "The flowers of war" in which Christian Bale also plays the lead role. Apart from staring Christian Bale both these films are similar in that they feature ridiculous characters in ridiculous situations. No offense to Mr Bale, he makes the best of a bad lot, but he does seem to be a bit of a jinx in this historical era. I realise that "Empire of the sun" is based on a "semi-auto biography" but it seems bizarre to me that the only movies of this historical era of China have British or American characters as their leads. Frankly, in an era in which millions of Chinese were being slaughtered or starved to death, why should I give a toss about the privileged treatment of a British boy, and a thoroughly unpleasant one at that? Perhaps one day we will get a real movie on this subject that will finally do it some justice. I do not know if the reverence for the Japanese that is so frequently flaunted in this movie is simply a reflection of J.G Ballard's original book, or something added by Spielberg or Stoppard. While I understand that in these enlightened times all the nations of the World are supposed to sit around the camp fire and sing "Kumbaya", it has to be said World War 2 was not Japan's finest hour as human beings. Therefore it seems not only strange but in poor taste that the Spielberg who recognises the horrors inflicted by the Germans on humanity in "Schindler's List" fails to recognise those inflicted by the Japanese in this movie, and in this respect it is an insult to the millions of civilian and military casualties. In fact, when I think about it, this movie is pretty much an insult to everybody. It is an insult to children, who do not behave like they do in this movie. It is an insult to adults, who do not behave as they do in this movie. It is an insult to every nationality represented. It is an insult to veterans. And it is an insult to the intelligence of the audience.

Great Britain's "nickname" historically was the empire upon which the sun never sets. This was due to their far-reaching imperialist nature. The film even begins with a history lesson / scene setting exposition which illustrates how Shanghai was basically a British colony, indistinguishable from England in terms of its buildings and infrastructure. Hong Kong was still under British rule until the end of the last century.So, when another reviewer, NeuroticMovieLover, describes this film as one showing the destruction caused by a nation that wanted to control everything, I must ask, which nation would THAT be? Fascism was rampant around the world, highly fashionable with those in power at that time. Business leaders in the United States bristled at the notion that Germany was not a trustworthy ally, even as they began to conquer Europe. It was only because American business interests were threatened by fascist expansion that the U.S. entered the war against the "Axis of evil". We were just the other side of the same imperialist coin. Our overlords were better at selling servitude as freedom than the SS, Mussolini's black shirts or the Hirohito cult of personality.This film was very good at portraying people from every quarter as being as flawed as they were noble. This was not a movie condemning Japan as the bad guys.

GOD playing tennis: that's what Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a privileged British schoolboy living in high colonial style in the pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai of 1941, sees in one of his dreams. God taking a photograph: Jim thinks he sees that four years and seemingly several lifetimes later, as a starving, exhausted prisoner witnessing the brilliant light of the atomic bomb.What transpires in between, the sweeping story of Jim's wartime exploits after he is separated from his family, is set forth so spectacularly in Steven Spielberg's ''Empire of the Sun'' that the film seems to speak a language all its own. In fact it does, for it's clear Mr. Spielberg works in a purely cinematic idiom that is quite singular. Art and artifice play equal parts in the telling of this tale. And the latter, even though intrusive at times, is part and parcel of the film's overriding style.Yes, when Jim crawls through swampy waters he emerges covered with movie mud, the makeup man's kind; when he hits his head, he bleeds movie blood. It's hard not to be distracted by such things. But it's also hard to be deterred by them, since that same movie-conscious spirit in Mr. Spielberg gives ''Empire of the Sun'' a visual splendor, a heroic adventurousness and an immense scope that make it unforgettable.There are sections of ''Empire of the Sun'' that are so visually expressive they barely require dialogue (although Tom Stoppard's screenplay, which streamlines J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, is often crisp and clever). Its first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film -an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai's last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding. Jim is first seen singing in a church choir (the Welsh hymn ''Suo Gan'' will echo again hauntingly later in the story), then gliding through crowded streets in his family's chauffeur- driven Packard. At home, he asks his parents off-handed questions about the coming war. When the three of them, elaborately costumed, heedlessly leave home for a party on the other side of the city, it's clear that their days there are numbered just from the way the Chinese servants wave goodbye.That first glimpse of the choirboys will prompt audiences to wonder which of these well-groomed, proper little singers is to be the film's leading man. Mr. Bale, who emerges from the choir by singing a solo, at first seems just a handsome and malleable young performer, another charming child star. But the epic street scene that details the Japanese invasion of the city and separates Jim from his parents reveals this boy to be something more. As Mr. Bale, standing atop a car amid thousands of extras and clasping his hands to his head, registers the fact that Jim is suddenly alone, he conveys the schoolboy's real terror and takes the film to a different dramatic plane. This fine young actor, who appears in virtually every frame of the film and ages convincingly from about 9 to 13 during the course of the story, is eminently able to handle an ambitious and demanding role.But other episodes are less sharply defined. When Jim, who has proudly won his right to live in the American barracks, returns to the British camp in which he formerly lived, it takes a moment to remember why he's back - not because the motive is unclear, but because his departure from the one place and return to the other are separated by intervening scenes.Still, there are many glorious moments here, among them Jim's near- religious experiences with the fighter planes he sees as halfway divine (in one nighttime scene, the sparks literally fly). And there is a full panoply of supporting characters, including Miranda Richardson, who grows more beautiful as her spirits fade, in the role of a married English woman who both mothers Jim and arouses his early amorous stirrings. It is the mothering that seems to matter most, for Jim's small satchel of memorabilia includes a magazine photograph of a happy family, a picture he takes with him everywhere. For a surrogate father, he finds the trickier figure of Basie (John Malkovich), a Yank wheeler-dealer with a sly Dickensian wit. Basie, who by turns befriends Jim and disappoints him, remains an elusive character, but Mr. Malkovich brings a lot of fire to the role. ''American, are you?'' one of his British fellow prisoners asks this consummate operator. ''Definitely,'' Mr. Malkovich says.''Gone With the Wind'' is playing at the biggest movie theater in Shanghai when the Japanese are seen invading that city, and ''Gone With the Wind'' is a useful comparison, at least in terms of subject and style. The makers of that film didn't really burn Atlanta; that wasn't their method. They, too, as Mr. Spielberg does, let the score sometimes trumpet the characters' emotions unnecessarily, and they might well have staged something as crazy as the ''Empire of the Sun'' scene in which the prisoners find an outdoor stadium filled with confiscated art and antiques and automobiles, loot that's apparently been outdoors for a while but doesn't look weatherbeaten in the slightest. Does it matter? Not in the face of this film's grand ambitions and its moments of overwhelming power. Not in the light of its soaring spirits, its larger authenticity, and the great and small triumphs that it steadily delivers.