![]() A few days later, he’s in a barracks and there’s another airdrop-a cannister on a parachute comes crashing through the ramshackle ceiling, and breaks open. Evacuated from the camp and forced to march, he’s out in the countryside dying of starvation when there’s an American airdrop and he gets some cans of Spam and other things to eat. ![]() He survives hunger and disease, a detention center, and three years in a prison camp. That’s what his poetry is.Īt the outbreak of the Second World War, Jim (Christian Bale), an eleven-year-old British boy in Shanghai-a kid who goes to school in a chauffeur-driven Packard-is separated from his parents during the mass exodus when the Japanese Army invades the city, on December 8, 1941. For the sake of emotion- to have something to say, to give the picture some meaning-he pumps it full of false emotion. Working on an enormous scale and with a large theme, he throws himself into bravura passages, lingers over them trying to give them a poetic obsessiveness, and loses his grasp of the narrative. And then, first in brief patches and then in longer ones, his directing goes terribly wrong. It’s swarming with people, all doing his bidding as the camera moves around the tops of stately buildings to the streets below. Steven Spielberg takes over Shanghai and makes it his city. It’s so gorgeously big you want to laugh in pleasure. Empire of the Sun begins majestically and stays strong for perhaps forty-five minutes. ![]()
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