Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, 1987)

The young son of a Shanghai-based textile magnate gets locked up in an internment camp when the Japanese swarm in after entering World War II. The boy darts around the camp and befriends the leader of some ragtag American rogues. Then the war ends.

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This is a decent WWII-prisoner story — a damn sight better than, say, Life is Beautiful — and it would almost make the jump to "pretty good" had Spielberg not instructed his buddy John Williams thusly: "You know that piece you did for the biking-in-front-of-the-moon shot in E.T.? In this movie, every cue should sound like that." (At least, that's how I assume it went down.) It's all there: you've got your maudlin, your faux-triumphant, your forcedly mischievous, your goofily suspenseful. The ridiculous juggernaut that is Williams' score crushes under its treads all beneath it: the visuals, the performances, the plot. The kid's running through the camp? Crank the music up. The kid's eating rations? Crank the music way up. What I tried to enjoy was invariably overpowered by every single instrument in the freakin' orchestra, plus a children's chorus for good measure.

But how's the film aside from the score? Hard to say, because I spent so much mental bandwidth vainly struggling to tune out the awful, awful score that few intellectual resources remained with which to do anything else. Production design? Nice, looked expensive. Acting? John Malkovich is in it, and he's always a plus. And the protagonist is a 13-year-old Christian Bale, who looks like the apple-cheeked head of regular Christian Bale affixed to a small body. Material? Comes from a semi-fictionalized J.G. Ballard memoir, so it's reasonably rich, and too few stories have been spun from the goings-on of Japanese-occupied Shanghai (though I must add that Ang Lee worked the setting a lot better last year when he added teh secks and called it Lust, Caution).

The narrative is somewhat more problematic — using "narrative" and "problematic" in a single sentence is not an act I'll soon live down, though at least I didn't employ the latter as a noun — because it doesn't mesh with the presentation. Empire of the Sun isn't anything more than the tale of an aristocratic kid doin' what he's gotta do under the less-than-ideal conditions foisted upon him. Then the conditions are lifted. Now, I'm the last person to complain when a film isn't molded rigidly enough in the shape of a story, but it's as if no other element of the movie thinks it's a slice-of-life from a prison camp. The elaborate, expensive production, presentation and (bad, bad, bad) score all seem to belong to a more straightforward piece of cinema, possibly with a false crisis, a false dawn and a third-act reversal.

So the movie doesn't agree with itself about what it is; it's a condition some critics misuse the term "schizophrenic" to describe. (They're looking for "dissociative identity disorder".) It would've helped to get clear in a pre-production meeting if they were making an observation of life in one of the lesser-known WWII prison camps through the eyes of a pre-adolescent, or if they were shooting the triumphant journey of a boy with an alien in the basket of his bike. I wonder if hacking off two-thirds of the budget wouldn't have addressed these issues; a surfeit of resources may have made for a lack of focus. This may be a prime contributor to why I gravitate, ceteris paribus, toward lower-budget films rather than than higher-budget ones. Low-budgets may still be poorly-conceived, but at least the contributors don't have the ability to wander off in separate directions. Also, they can't afford John Williams.