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Empire of the Sun Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 49 Reviews)

Epic Sleeper
Young Jim reminds me of todays American and British kids. Spoiled
and far removed from hardships. Christian Bale as Jim gave the best child actor performance I ever seen. Every teen age boy should see this film. Dont expect a feel good ending here.
War is tragic and the film depicts it from Jims view. Often emotional, confusing, full of wonder of every kind, and tragic with a desparate will to submit to survivel with death vying for you, pulled me into Jims world in a downward spiral. Through out the movie I wondered what I would have done. If I could have survived. This is not a movie to see with 200 strangers (which I am guessing is why it didnt do so well), but best alone or with the ones you love. A beutiful work of art and acting that leaves you dazed and numb with thought at the end and beyond.

No work for spoiled rich kids
I liked the movie until they got to the main camp and you see people playing golf and women doing laundry like there at weekend camp site. I guess the Japs just housed and fed these people to be generous. I guess they had enough Japanese civilians to do all the work in the factories.

Tedious
This is an unbearably tedious movie, interesting only for the lavish recreation of pre-war Shanghai early in the film. It's classic Spielberg, where the children are the innocent visionaries and all adults are corrupt. Its visual devices (a beggar early in the movie who taps his begging bowl outside the mansion owned by the wealthy British is echoed later in the movie as interned British prisoners hold their food bowls) are obvious and repetitious. John Malkovitch plays a typically creepy character that, in real life, probably had a pedophile's interest in the young hero, but in the cleaned up version, is merely a sort of Fagin to the Oliver Twist-like young hero. So boring that we debated turning it off, and eventually used the glorious "fast forward" button to get to the end. Proof that even exciting real life stories can be made tedious and dull in the wrong hands.

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