I am referring to the movie directed by Steven Spielberg with a young Christian Bale in the lead. Anyway, my brother recently purchased the China-made version of the movie (NOTE: NOT pirated!! It's original but cheaper sans the special features and all.. and oh yea, only Chinese subtitles) and I caught it on and off today while my brother and his girlfriend were watching it, although I admit that it was so compelling that I sat through the 2nd half of the movie till the end).

I've read the book, but that was eons ago when I was probably too young to understand the subtlities of the story so frankly, I can't remember much about the book. The same goes for the movie, which I watched when I was probably like around 10 years old. However, the movie did give me quite an impact like all other movies set during war-time cos I guess that as a child of some privileges myself, I imagined how devastating it would be to be left all alone in a war-torn country having to fend for myself.

Anyway, that disturbing feeling was actually part of what kept me from wanting to watch the movie in its entirety again today. But after reading this article I found on IMDB.com, I think I'm gonna find some time next week to really sit down and watch it very very closely.

Article is as below, taken from IMDB board.
More info at IMDB.

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Empire of the Sun: Spielberg's Overlooked Misunderstood Masterwork

By Ernest Rister, from THE OUTSIDER: A SHADOW ON THE SUN (12/17/99)

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)

JAMIE: I was dreaming about God.
MARY: What did he say?
JAMIE: Nothing. He was playing tennis. Perhaps that's where God is all the time -- [in our dreams] -- and that's why you can't see Him when you're awake, do you think?
MARY: I don't know. I don't know about God.
JAMIE: Perhaps He's our dream...and we're His.

-- EMPIRE OF THE SUN In the short documentary, THE CHINA ODYSSEY, Steven Spielberg talks about his take on author J.G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel, EMPIRE OF THE SUN. Ballard's book details his own true-life experiences as a British child of privilege separated from his parents by the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1941, and one of Spielberg's boldest opinions of the work was that half of the book was a lie -- half of it true in the broad strokes, certainly, but it was Spielberg's belief that the details and vignettes were completely warped by Ballard's childhood perception.

This is crucial to understanding Spielberg's work on the film - which has long been dismissed or completely, fundamentally misread - not a single shot can be trusted.

Consider the scene referenced in italics above. Spielberg concludes this passage with a shot of Jamie in bed while his mother and father look on fondly. Spielberg's editor Michael Kahn then does something strange - he performs a quick dissolve of this same shot onto itself, which at first glance appears to be a gaffe.

Only later - and only if you're looking - do you see the payoff to this moment. Jamie becomes separated from his parents and spends the remainder of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp. He's spent years idealizing his parents to the point where he finally admits - in a scene of tremendous power - he can't remember what they actually look like any more. Subtly illustrating this point, hanging next to Jim's makeshift prison bed is a Norman Rockwell painting torn out of the pages of LIFE Magazine. The painting is of a Mother and Father looking fondly at a child in bed. It is the exact same image from earlier in the film.

The implication here is that the earlier scene never happened, or at the very least didn't happen in the way Spielberg presented it to you -- the reality of the moment has been skewed by Jamie's fantasies. Either way, Spielberg's camera lied to you. And there wasn't a film critic in America who noticed.

Spielberg's camera is a font of dishonesty in EMPIRE OF THE SUN, a blazingly original, criminally ignored film. Nothing in the frame can be trusted. Consider the first appearance of John Malkovich as the stranded maritime con man, Basie. When we first meet Basie, he is one cool customer, strongly backlit, his face obscured by dark sunglasses and a G.I. cap. This is all fine and good, except Basie's appearance has already been foretold by the cover of the WINGS comic book Jamie reads in the first moments of the film. The cover of the comic details a back-lit G.I. wearing dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed cap.

In the closing moments of the film, Jim confronts Basie, and finds him a thin, shell of a man with bad skin, still pursuing his dream of being the pirate "lord of the Yangtzee". Is his physical condition simply the result of malnutrition? (unlikely, since at this moment Basie is in seemingly ample supply of Hershey's Chocolate bars)? No - the truth is that Steven Spielberg, long considered dead behind the eyes in some circles, made a film that toyed with reality as much as RASHOMON or BLOW UP, but because at that time he was critically regarded as a live-action Walt Disney, his work was dismissed.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN would seem to be sitting up and begging for analysis, so loaded it is with moments of fantasy and reverie in the midst of suffering. The film is all about the human need for escapism and denial in the face of a harsh reality (a human feature also highlighted in GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES), but it was received as a Shanghai version of AN AMERICAN TAIL by way of a David Lean imitator. This was incorrect. Many critics, in fact, directly faulted Spielberg for the unreality of EMPIRE OF THE SUN and took him to task for it. They missed the point. Spielberg literally lifts the subconscious interpretation of events by a 12 year-old boy and prints those memories onto film. The prison camp - which was criticized for being a Hollywood construct and not a real environ - exists as the child remembers it. Since children can have quite a fine time with a cardboard box, you can imagine how much fun a boy who loves planes had living next to an airfield. Spielberg puts that interpretation on film.

The headache-inducing result of his labor was that audiences took his moments - some of them wildly abstracted - at face value, too long conditioned to shut off their frontal lobes when viewing a work with the word "Spielberg" attached to it. The film is jammed full of impossible moments that clearly are not happening, including a toy glider that stays impossibly aloft, the aforementioned scene involving the family, a trio of pilots who salute the young boy in a hail of welding sparks, a pilot of a P-51 who waves to Jim, a refrigerator that bursts open revealing - instead of food - glitter and toys...there's a gesture that Jim sees his father perform, rubbing his finger across his upper lip. Later, Jim will have a new father figure, Dr. Rawlins, who will repeat the same gesture. Film critic Patrick Taggart actually asked what the point of this gesture was. Ten years later, I'm happy to tell him the gesture is the result of Jim's fading recollection of his parents. He remembers his father making the gesture, and as Dr. Rawlins becomes his "new" father, Jim begins superimposing attributes onto him, including his father's own mannerisms.

Spielberg reveals to us this inner life in an enormously subtle way. The standard practice for Dream Scenes is to clue the audience in by the use of hazy wipes and dissolves. Spielberg discarded these completely, trusting in the intelligence of his audience. One quick throw-away even spotlights the British POWs reading from A Midsummer Nights Dream, another little clue to the movie's intentions that Spielberg discards like so much pocket lint.

Time and time again, Spielberg and his screenwriter Tom Stoppard serve up an entire cast of characters who choose to ignore the reality of the world around them and end up emaciated shells of their former selves or worse. The film's message seems to be that in the face of such a serious reality, denial and escapism are deadly, and the world must be dealt with on its own terms. Jim's Great Dream - other than flying - is to reunite with his parents, and he carries all of his childhood memorabilia in a small suitcase. Jim must forsake this fantasy and grapple with reality - this case that contains his dreams will later be seen floating alongside the dead in the Shanghai Harbor.

Because of his pre-occupation with exploring this theme, EMPIRE OF THE SUN is unique in the Spielberg canon in that it is a film less concerned with plot than it is with examining an idea - the value and necessity for denial and escapism -- and all the ways the human animal lies to itself. The unfortunate result is a film that winds down emotionally by the end of its 2nd hour. Movies are things we go to for many reasons, but primarily we go because we want to feel something. Works like EMPIRE OF THE SUN almost function like a parlor-game -- they're a great work-out for the left-side of your soul and a litmus test for how you view film, but they're also a bit emotionally cold. This oft-repeated criticism of EMPIRE OF THE SUN isn't something so easily dismissed away. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA sported a hole in the center of its drama in the shape of a man who was a total enigma. EMPIRE OF THE SUN - which David Lean himself was attached to at one point - also has a protagonist at its center who is emotionally distant, keeping the viewer at arm's reach. The difference being, in LAWRENCE, you had a man of fathomless interest and contradictions at its fore, and in EMPIRE OF THE SUN you had a spoiled child.

To me, EMPIRE OF THE SUN represents the death of the Spielberg I grew up with, just as much as it tells the tale of a child who must shuck off the best parts of childhood in order to survive. Its my personal belief that the failure of this film was a giant blow to the man, whose career went into a tailspin even as it was generating ever-higher box office returns. Spielberg's public quotes around this time are the most self-loathing of his life, referring to works like INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, ALWAYS, and HOOK as "hamburgers" and himself as little more than a McDonald's fry chief. INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE - in particular - is the flattest, least-inspired and assured film he ever made.

The great thing about video is that it gives films a second chance, and it is never too late to rediscover a buried classic. EMPIRE OF THE SUN deserves your attention on home video, but what's more, I think Spielberg's work in the film deserves your open mind and your further contemplation.

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Anyway, apart from the marvelling at Spielberg's talents, watching the latest Batman in one of his earliest roles this time really blew me away. He was as much the actor as he is now - wonderful, captivating, convincing and, as one reviewed described, devastating. And all this from a 12 year-old! You really have to watch it for yourself to know how emotionally affecting it was.


Bale in Empire of the Sun (1987) and in Batman Begins (2005)

It's interesting how some child actors don't seem to grow into the great actors they once were (especially in Asia...), yet others do, or even become more of what they were. Christian Bale is definitely one of them, so is Joseph Gorden-Levitt. I hope child actors like Haley Joel Osment and TVB's Jenny Shing will become one of them too.