Empire of the Sun

(Steven Spielberg, USA, 1987)

For over 30 years, the SF stories of J.G. Ballard [1930-2009] have disturbed and impressed readers with their fatal, disquieting visions: an apocalyptic traffic jam; the dwellers of a high-rise apartment bock descending into barbarity; a drowned giant found one day washed up mysteriously on a shore.

He is the dark poet laureate of social entropy, of the human race’s inevitable decline into vicious, amoral animality. Yet, for all that, there is a strange, perverse vitality – enthusiasm, even – driving Ballard’s prose; his characters, as weird as they can get, at least have some kind of knack for surviving and improvising their lot. And imagination – albeit of the darkest kind, within the direst circumstances – counts for a lot in the Ballardian universe: it represents the last flare-up of élan in a dying world.

Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, one might have attributed these images and themes to Ballard’s own fertile imagination. However, with the publication of his 1984 memoir Empire of the Sun (the first of three such books), gruesomely detailing his childhood in 1940s war-torn Shanghai, it became instantly evident how directly personal – almost documentary-like – much of Ballard’s fiction really is.

Ballard’s prose is full of surreal apparitions, bizarre occurrences and inexplicable human acts. This was plain reality for the young Jamie, who wandered alone through mine-filled ruins and made fleeting, ambiguous alliances with diverse strangers of various nationalities. Or rather, it was his second reality – considering he had been wrenched out of the no-less surreal decadence and merriment of a stately British, colonial home, one that was swiftly reduced to a pillaged ruin the moment that the conquering Japanese army marched in (they occupied the city between 1941 and 1945).

But how to translate any of Ballard, SF or memoir, to the screen? Ben Wheatley’s semi-mainstream version of High-Rise (2015) is a poor, chaotic attempt, while various minimalistic, low-budget efforts haven’t fared much better. Only David Cronenberg cracked the code of Ballardian adaptation in his masterpiece Crash (1996) – a one-off success dependent upon the gamble of departing so far from the style and method of that highly experimental novel.

In any effort to convey JGB to cinema, the author’s special brand of characterisation – which is, very often, flat as a pancake and just as featureless (and that works OK on the page) – poses a major hurdle to be surmounted; Cronenberg handled that problem by casting utterly charismatic presences like James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas and Deborah Kara Unger. Not ‘relatable’, maybe, but eminently watchable.

But Spielberg? This arch purveyor of what Meaghan Morris once nailed as “sentimental redemption” in glossy, ultra-conventionalised narratives would seem the least likely choice of all to bring any piece of Ballard – including Empire of the Sun – to filmic fruition. OK, it’s centred in the consciousness of a little boy, and Spielberg loves, whenever he can (from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [1982] to The Fabelmans [2022]), to begin from that base. But the cloying, reactionary message-boards of Always (1989), The Terminal (2002) or The Post (2017) seem very far from Ballard’s black heart.

Not for the last time, however – it was to happen once more (another big surprise) when Spielberg took over Stanley Kubrick’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) project – a curious alchemy has taken place. Spielberg’s inherent drive to make every screen moment a (sometimes literally) blinding super-spectacle enhances, rather than dilutes, Ballard’s described childhood nightmare.

With typical naïveté, Spielberg apparently regarded the source material as a rite of passage (ho hum): “How it takes an entire war to turn a young boy into a man”. But the film itself expresses a very different sentiment. One Japanese officer calls Jamie (Christian Bale) a “difficult boy”, and the words are apt. Jamie is unformed, dissociated, with pieces of his psyche strewn all over the ravaged landscape.

Empire of the Sun portrays (whatever its auteur’s conscious intentions) a boy with no coherent, organic self. He speaks bits of several languages, has no firm sense of national origin, and radically modifies his behaviour for each person he encounters. Jamie tends to see everything in the external world as a projection of his own, inner fantasies – even, in an unforgettable scene, the ripples of the inaugural A-bomb explosion. In effect, it’s the direct underside of the Spielbergian Myth!

The supposedly Happy Ending brings no eventual peace to to Jamie – or to us.

When I first saw this film, I dismissed it without giving it a second thought. I was fed up with Spielberg’s brainless epics – and I would again feel that way, at specific moments, in the future. However, forced to rewatch Empire of the Sun for a professional obligation four years after its initial release, and managing to detach it (for once) from the usual pro- and anti-Spielberg arguments, I discovered, with fresh eyes, a compelling, haunting, quite extraordinary film. It stands on its own as as a parable about the impossibility of ever being a whole person.

MORE Spielberg: The Color Purple, Hook, The Lost World, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Munich, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park

© Adrian Martin October 1991 / November 2025