Thanks for the memories!

Expected more

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Awesome in all aspect! This movie is a piece of art! ... showing through Jim's eyes the war!

I can see that a tale told from a child's point of view how it would stir the imagination of one Steven Spielberg. Empire Of The Sun is a really imaginative story of a young boy stuck in World War II China in a truly terrible situation cut off from his parents. Yet young Christian Bale turns the whole thing gradually into an adventure of sorts. Up to the age of 11 young Bale has lived in the British quarter of Shanghai and in fact has never seen the United Kingdom, his father Rupert Frazer owns a textile factory. Bale and his parents live in luxury among the millions of Chinese.What one should remember when watching Empire Of The Sun is that since the Opium War of 1841 western powers and Japan joined them took small little nibbles out of China and in fact were granted by the weak Chinese governments special treatment in their quarters. Frazer, Emily Richard his wife and young Bale lived under British law and did not answer to the Chinese. The other powers did the same, even the USA had its own quarter in Shanghai as well as other large Chinese cities. That only ended with the Communist takeover in 1949.It ended a bit prematurely for the west in 1941 when the Japanese attacked America, Great Britain, the Netherlands. That's when Bale's well ordered world falls apart.I had to marvel at how when Bale came home and the parents were gone and some looting had occurred how his reactions were. Without any dialog Bale runs through a gamut of emotions. Great job of acting and directing.Later on Bale is rounded up and taken to an internment camp next to an airfield. Fascinating how Bale who had an interest in aviation looks at the Japanese planes and become almost worshipful of the enemy. He even makes friend with some of the Japanese, a group not known for treating prisoners well in World War II.Joe Pantoliano and John Malkovich are a pair of American adventurers, no better than they ought to be. They're caught along with Bale and sent to the internment camp. Our adult eyes see them as a pair of bottom feeders. But we see them through the child's eyes also and they become sort of devil may care rogues that one reads in pulp fiction the kind Bale no doubt read. Steven Spielberg did a marvelous job of recreating wartime China and it certainly helped to shoot the film there. Just part of the People's Republic's post Mao entry into the community of nations.The adult performers are fine. Empire Of The Sun got a flock of Oscar nominations in technical categories, no gold though. But it did inaugurate the career of Christian Bale who's done pretty well for himself as an adult actor too.This one is highly recommended for its realism and encouragement of imagination.

There are only a few films perhaps less well remembered in the career of director Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan), this is one of those films, many critics see this film as a trial run for Schindler's List, I just knew it was set during the war, had a good cast and an average rating. Basically set during World War II, at the time of Japan's invasion of China, twelve-year-old British upper middle class schoolboy Jamie "Jim" Graham (young Christian Bale) enjoys a privileged and spoiled life in the Shanghai International Settlement. After the Attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese invade the settlement, and Jim ends up separated from his mother (Emily Richard) and father (Rupert Frazer), through the panicked mob his parents shout that they will come back for him, Jim spends time hiding in his abandoned home and eats the remaining food. When food runs out Jim ventures out into the city, which has been devastated by bombings, he is taken in by American hustling partners Basie (John Malkovich) and Frank Demarest (Joe Pantoliano), but they are taken by the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center in Shanghai for processing. In 1945, nearing the end of the Pacific War, Jim survives through terror and poor living conditions, establishing a successful trading network, camp leader Sergeant Nagata (Masatô Ibu) gets involved with it, and Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers), the camp's British doctor, teaches Jim, he learns how to speak Japanese. Jim visits the American POW barracks, he idolises the Americans and their culture, Basie sends him to set snare traps outside the camp's wire, in fact Basie is using him to test the area for land mines, to plot an escape, Basie rewards Jim by allowing him to move into the American barracks. As time has passed Jim has forgotten what his parents look like, the base is suddenly attacked by a group of American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft, as a result the Japanese decide to evacuate the camp, Basie, despite promising to take Jim with him, escapes during the confusion, many of the prisoners die of fatigue, starvation and disease during the march into the wilderness. Jim arrives with the crowd at a football stadium near Nantao, filled with confiscated luxuries, Jim wanders off and overhears the news that the Japanese have surrendered and the war is over, after witnessing a Japanese teenager he met before being killed, Basie finds him and offers to find his parents. Jim is highly traumatised by everything he has gone through, and angered by the accidental death of his friend, but he is placed by Americans in an orphanage, here he is finally reunited with his parents in the end. Also starring Miranda Richardson as Mrs. Victor, Leslie Phillips as Maxton, Peter Gale as Mr. Victor, Robert Stephens as Mr. Lockwood, Burt Kwouk as Mr. Chen, Paul McGann as Lieutenant Price and Ben Stiller as Dainty. Bale does give a good performance as the boy separated from his parents and doing whatever he can to survive, the presence of stars such as Malkovich, Richardson and Havers are fine as well, the story is based on a semi- autobiographical novel by JG Ballard, but I agree with critics, being from the point of view of the boy this is perhaps a superficial look at life during war and occupation, there are some good sequences that engage you, but overall it is just an alright Second World War coming-of-age drama. It was nominated the Oscar was Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction- Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Music for John Williams, it won the BAFTAs for Best Cinematography, Best Score and Best Sound, and it was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design and Best Production Design, and it was nominated the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Original Score. Worth watching!

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.