Empire of the Sun

Annotation for KRRR! 2017 by Miroslav Cicin

- Would you like some chocolate?

- Yes, please.

- Me too, do you have any?

Empire of the Sun was Steven Spielberg's second attempt to defy his own media image and make a thematically ambitious film. And while the subject matter of The Color Purple was rather distant from traditional Spielbergian motifs, in Empire of the Sun he had already incorporated a number of his characteristic elements associated with childhood and adolescence. It is an adaptation of the autobiographical novel by British writer J. G. Ballard, which David Lean had previously applied for. Steven Spielberg also established an unexpected collaboration with the esteemed playwright Tom Stoppard (e.g. the author of the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he himself filmed in 1990), with whom he allegedly complemented each other very well - the artist of the word and the artist of visual storytelling are said to have significantly influenced each other.

Empire of the Sun is a film about a prodigal child Jamie (12-year-old Christian Bale) from the British upper class in pre-war and wartime Japan, who is prevented by the harsh conditions of the war camps from remaining not only prodigal, but also a child... Jamie becomes Jim, whose guide to the adult world is the very contradictory Basie (John Malkovich).

This is an important turning point in Spielberg's work, in which, in accordance with the above, a number of characteristic motifs appear, but in a completely different perspective than before. The main character is a child, but his childhood is systematically suppressed, ridiculed and destroyed, and escape offers no solution... only numbness prevails. This also leads to a much-discussed conclusion, the positive or negative of which is a question of interpretation. In any case, Jim's final look suggests that Jamie is unlikely to return, having died somewhere along the way from taking food for the dead to cowering in front of Basie and crawling in the mud to the death of a person he might still have felt friendly towards. While singing behind the barbed wire...