Movie Review: Empire of the Sun

This movie is about a British kid (Jamie) living in Shanghai right before and through World War II. He and his parents are rich and have a grand life as rich people and he loves flying with a passion. However, everything changes when the Japanese invade and take over and in trying to escape, Jamie is separated from his parents. Soon, all the Brits that remained in the city are forced into containment camps. Life is full of sickness, but it also isn’t bad as the prisoners can do what they want. Jamie does well as he has connections with the leader of the American single men cabin, and one can see his maturation. I of course won’t give away the ending.
First of all, the movie was long: over 2.5 hours  and the plot was really dragged along. Things happened rapidly in the beginning, almost too fast to tell exactly who was who and what was going on. In the middle, everything seemed to slow down until the end when he confusingly goes from place to place. I personally found the concept interesting as I had never seen a movie about British civilian POWs in China during WWII, but the movie was overall somewhat lame. Jamie just seemed to be in the camp and their was a progression in his maturity, but it seemed rather pointless. The movie didn’t seem to point to anything grand or contain any real action. Romance was kept to an extreme minimum, violence occurred, sometimes purposely off-camera. I often feel this way about POW movies. The archetypal monomyth elements are present in being caught and leaving, but there’s so much in between when they’re just stuck in the camp, that it isn’t very interesting. I mean, let’s face it, life’s boring in those camps. Their were a lot of attempted cool slow-motion scenes with cool backgrounds, but it just seemed kind of like the director said “We’re trying to make this look cool”. Add to the fact that the central character is a 12 year old boy, and you’ve got a movie with both forced child and adult elements in it and it fails to strike a good balance. I think a whole hour of the internment camp part could probably be chopped and it would retain quite a bit of it’s effect. The theme music of choir boys singing in Latin is pretty good though…