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"Jim had begun to dream of wars."
J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun1
Steven Spielberg's film Empire of the Sun (1987), based on J.G. Ballard's novel, is a cross between a boy's adventure and a prisoner-of-war film: the boy's adventure is, of course, a Spielberg specialty, and so is the WWII film-although not until Empire did he focus on the grim side of war. David Lean, who has made classic films in both genres-Oliver Twist ( 1948) and The Bridge on the River Kwcii ( 1957)-was scheduled to direct the project until he asked Spielberg to take over. After The Color Purple (1985), Empire allowed Spielberg to continue to grow as a filmmaker, adapting critically acclaimed popular novels for a more mature audience. Spielberg, aided by Tom Stoppard's thoughtful adaptation and perhaps inspired by Lean, created a visually stunning war epic filled with rich imagery, and something new for his career: a psychologically profound character study. Instead of the flattened affect of Ballard's novel, he presents a moving, child's-eye view of war. The boy hero, Jim, is forced to grow up fast when he is separated from his parents in the chaos of wartime Shanghai and interned in a Japanese camp. He survives his early adolescence (from about age 9-13) under enormous stress; the film thrusts us into the distorted, dreamlike perceptions of his war-induced neurosis, and we get not so much a realistic war movie as a study in mania: a boy's fantastic dream of war.
I will admit the flaws of the film: it is too long and sometimes too slow, spectacle occasionally overwhelms narrative and threatens to glamorize war, and John Williams's spiritual music becomes obtrusive. Spielberg has sweetened Ballard's story by making Jim braver and the other characters kinder (for example, Spielberg's Jim, because of his bravery, is inducted into the American POW barracks as an honorary GI) and by eliminating some of Ballard's more gruesome elements, such as public stranglings and piles of maggoty corpses.2
Nevertheless, I prefer the film to the novel. Ballard is a master of entropie despair, and his account of war is curiously flat and unemotional, for all its cataloguing of horrors, or perhaps as a defense against his material; that might have made for a...