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EMPIRE OF THE SUN

Steven Spielberg United States, 1987
The boy is portrayed by an adolescent Christian Bale, whose joyously captivating performance (arguably the film's strongest feat) ranges wide from physical stunts to melodramatic bursts of rage and tears, and the angelic performance of a hair-raising Welsh lullaby, "Suo Gân."The film erupts with some wonderful WWII clichés that only Hollywood can get away with, larger-than-life cinematography, and a cool, sly John Malkovich. What else do you really need?
January 11, 2017
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True/False
It is, in a strong if minority opinion (mine included), Spielberg's greatest film… In an image both richly reverberate yet going beyond the director's previous work, it's what E.T. might have felt if we had gone to his planet—he'd finally gotten home, only to realize he no longer fit in. That ultimate isolation—the loneliness of growing up and beyond one's parents, has its most potent expression here… Empire ends not with reassurance but with a question mark. What will this boy become?
January 3, 2017
It's arguably Spielberg's strangest object, a near-constant string of sounds and images that, even in their avowed verisimilitude, are possessed of a heightened unreality and contain scarring psychological depths.
April 5, 2012
Nearly 20 years after its release, Empire of the Sun can now be seen as an intriguing combination of Spielberg's two sides: the earlier childlike, escapist showman and the later, more mature director. As such, the film represents a coming of age for the filmmaker as well as the film's young protagonist.
October 11, 2006
Ever since Duel," Spielberg said at the time, "I've been looking for a visual narrative… that could be told exclusively through visual metaphors and nonpretentious symbolism. And nothing came along until Empire." It is at this level that the film is most successful: in terms of its marriage of style and theme, Empire of the Sun is one of Spielberg's most ambitious films.
February 7, 2006
Any moral vision, like any coherent style, demands the suppression of certain elements as well as the persistence of certain others, but Spielberg's anywar or everywar veers in so many directions that it ultimately becomes any movie or every movie: "Spielberg" becomes the only persistent form of coherence, which means that everything else that the movie is about--including World War II and wars in general--becomes incoherent beyond the borders of a single sequence.
December 18, 1987
Spielberg, it seems, has caught a dose of the Woody Allen disease: No longer content with his talent to amuse, he`s grasping now toward profundity, trying to make one for the ages. But Spielberg`s problem, much like Allen`s, is a lack of experience to match his ambition. "Empire of the Sun" isn`t a film drawn from observation or introspection but from some vague impressions of what a masterpiece should be.
December 11, 1987
Although Tom Stoppard's script lifts Ballard's spare dialogue directly from the page, the context in which it is placed is kitsch.
December 11, 1987
Spielberg has dreamed of flying before, and this time he earns his wings.
December 9, 1987