Steve Sailer writes: I thought Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” was the greatest movie of the 1980s. Spielberg auditioned hundreds looking for the best boy actor in Britain, and as of 2016 it seems pretty reasonable to think he found him in Christian Bale.
Usually, boy actors are exceptionally boyish looking so they can be older than their apparent screen age: DiCaprio, for example, is a babyfaced guy who is also a great movie star. But Bale, on the other hand, has always been a normally handsome guy who always looks about his real age.
But “Empire of the Sun” bombed at the box office and Christian Bale didn’t get much of a career boost from it.
It’s adapted from an autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard by Tom Stoppard, but much of the movie is taken from a handful of pages in the book.
There are a lot of very Stoppardian moments in movie. Stoppard in his early plays like After Magritte had developed this technique of “real surrealism” where he displays some highly implausible tableau and then backtracks to show you the fairly mundane reasons behind the scene. But Stoppard mostly played this for laughs, while “Empire of the Sun” is full of astonishing scenes for which the explanation is: The Biggest War of All Time.
In an interview, Stoppard asserted that most Stoppardian moments in the movie, such as the amazing kamikaze sequence, weren’t actually in his script. Stoppard said his imagination doesn’t work on that big budget of a scale. He attributed them to Spielberg (or, I might add, whomever Spielberg hired to scriptdoctor Stoppard’s work). The movie serves as sort of Spielberg’s giant budget tribute to Stoppard; but there aren’t that many people who like both Stoppard and Spielberg, so the Venn diagram of “Empire of the Sun” fanatics is small.
