Empire of the Sun

It’s good! It’s Spielberg so it’s going to be good. I watched this basically entirely on the premise that it's adapted from a J. G. Ballard book: the last J. G. Ballard book I read was a bit of a trip.

The pacing of The Empire of the Sun was a little weird, it kept going in fits and starts. There’s a big time skip in the middle that I think was the right thing to do. But also a lot of what we would now recognise as tropes that seem a little bit facile.

The kid on the other side of the fence basically just got used as a prop, and multiple props at that. I don’t know what the story was with his stand-in parents, Natasha Richardson and that other bloke. For a little while I thought they were his parents and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t reacting more powerfully to seeing him again.

On the other hand, boy oh boy can Christian Bale act. Seeing his face, already so expressive but so familiar from his adult work, was a real treat. And John Malkovich’s character was terrific as well, always ready with a bon mot. I appreciated that his disappearance in the end actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing: if Jamie had gone with him then I suspect that things would have gone poorly. Davy, the other boy that John Malkovich's character was close to, was nowhere to be seen later on (I think).

Although geographically I just could not figure out how everything hung together, how people showed up or disappeared. I guess that’s just the Magic of Moviemaking (tm)!