Empire of the Sun

A fairly boring film with one of the most absolutely obnoxious characters ever to appear in a movie. It's primarily about a young boy who, with his family, is taken prisoner when Singapore falls to the Japanese, and they end up in internment camps.

The boy (Jim Graham) is fascinated by Japanese airplanes and actually makes friends (sort of) with a kamikaze pilot.

The film gives a fairly good indication about the conditions in the internment camps, but leaves out some of the brutalities that were experienced in many of the camps.

Jim becomes friends with an American (Basie) who is basically running a series of schemes to make some money even while in the camps.

It's supposedly a “coming of age” film about Jim, but, at least in my opinion, he started the film as a brat and basically ends the film as a brat. His parents and he were part of the “colonial masters” system, where the British people lived a very good life while treating everyone all the Asians as people far beneath them in status and quality.

One of the particularly annoying parts was when, early in the film, the Japanese enter Singapore and Jim runs around and around, trying over and over to surrender. All I could think of was “kid, just how dumb are you?”

We are led to believe that the kid had been taught to speak Japanese by his father, but apparently the teaching of the language did not include any of the teaching about the culture of Japan.

Anyhow, the kid gets taken to the internment camp and he ends up running various schemes for Basie. He bounces back and forth between people to stay with. He leaves camp when everyone is forced to leave, but he makes his way back by himself and seems to plan to stay there forever.

The kid's obnoxious, he doesn't really mature at all, some of the film wouldn't make much sense unless you knew the history of the times, and you don't feel any real sympathy for the people in the camps. On top of this, the film somewhat sugar-coats the internment experience. Definitely not a movie that I would ever bother to watch again.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page