Empire of the Sun

Another film with a family torn apart – this time by war. I didn’t enjoy this film as much as I thought I would (I think Hope and Glory is a better picture along the same lines) and I was actually struck by how the film didn’t stand out as a Spielberg production – not so much control of the audience through the placement of the camera, less over sentimentality than you would normally expect from Spielberg (especially given the subject matter) and none of the out of place or strained humor that sometimes detaches you from his stories. Perhaps the greatest obstacle was the character of Jamie/Jim himself. He was just too self-centered and unaware of the suffering of those around him for me to really care for his character. A few interesting scenes though - sexuality is at least referred to (uncommon in a Spielberg film) while the boy watches the couple from his makeshift room, the flash of the atomic bomb being mistake for a soul ascending (but could he have seen the bombs in Japan from where he was?) and the mother and father’s response when they are reunited with Jamie (the father at first walks right by him as if he no longer recognizes his son and later only the mother embraces Jamie – the father only able to stand by uncomfortably witnessing this show of emotion even though they have been separate by years of hardships). We come to see flying equated with freedom, however, there is very little freedom in the film – it feels stifling and depressing most of the time. Even Jamie’s rising above the stupidity of war and not seeing the world as black or white, good or evil, but seeing the honorable characters of the flyers and soldiers on both sides trapped in a war they did not choose, but will fight till their deaths was hard to embrace at times – and we too may wish to remind him that rooting for the enemy to be glorious may work fine in a comic book or the dreams of a child, but have no place in the real world where people are suffering and dying.