Empire of the Sun Review

A boy's face keeps getting lost inside the crowd of the Shanghai exodus, and that is the organising image of the whole thing: a war measured entirely by what a child is still willing to be thrilled by. Christian Bale, barely a teenager, gives one of the least mannered performances any child has given on film, moving from a plummy brat cycling through his own emptied house to a scavenging fixer who salutes kamikaze pilots with real reverence, and not one of those transitions announces itself.

Allen Daviau stuffs the frames with detail so the boy is forever being swallowed by them, and the dawn ceremony where Jim's treble voice carries a Welsh lullaby across a field of men about to die is one of the few times sentiment and horror have shared a shot without either one losing. Then Tom Stoppard's third act arrives. Once Jim reaches the stadium of looted furniture the film has said what it has to say and keeps saying it for another half hour, and John Williams' choir starts doing work the images were doing better unaccompanied. John Malkovich's Basie ought to be the motor of the middle and instead disappears for twenty minutes at a stretch.