Empire of the Sun

Spielberg moves into the big time here, with an epic depiction of China in the tumultuous early days of the Japanese invasion, as seen through the eyes of a small boy who gets separated from his parents. Some of the vistas are breathtaking, and certainly it is a noble effort, but the end result is more numbing than anything. Spielberg directs well (perhaps "orchestrated" would be a better word) but what this picture really needed was some serious editing. It goes on way too long, and your attention is constantly being diverted. The opening sequences--setting up the imperial lifestyle of the visiting English--are wonderful, and the later scenes of social order disintegrating (including the sequence in which the boy gets separated from his parents) have a dreadful grandeur, but the further the picture moves past this point the more unraveled it gets. Towards the end, we get hallucinatory passages (almost inevitably a lethal maneuver; I mean, when you see these, you know the picture is done for, and you certainly lose my interest) wherein you aren't really sure what is real and what is not (at which point I really start to tune out) and it's as if what Spielberg doesn't realize is that visual impact alone does not a good picture make. Some of the subtexts and interludes are finely drawn (i.e. the flying stuff), but they cannot make up for the sensory barrage you are forced to endure. There was a great picture here struggling to get out, but it smothered under the weight of too many intentions and about a half-hour’s worth of excess celluloid.