Steven Spielberg and the corrosive dystopian novelist J.G. Ballard may seem like irreconcilable sensibilities. But Spielberg's 1987 adaptation of Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun — a project initiated by David Lean, and which bears some of his epic sweep — is one of his most unusual and striking films; it's rare among even the underrated items in his filmography in that it has never really found its audience.
In a career-launching role at age 12, young Christian Bale plays the upper-crust British schoolboy displaced by the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The chaotic exodus sequence that strands the boy is among the finest setpieces the director ever shot, and the journey that follows, stranding the boy in an internment camp under the shifty mentorship of opportunistic POW John Malkovich, is dark even in Spielberg's canon of imperiled-child/vanished-parent movies.
It's a beautiful film, though, scripted by Tom Stoppard and featuring Miranda Richardson, Joe Pantoliano, Masato Ibu and a young Ben Stiller; it screens in a 4K digital restoration as part of The Belcourt's summer-long “Best of Both Worlds” repertory series. (Next week: one of our favorite films of the ’90s, Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.)
