Empire of the Sun (1987)

"Empire of the Sun" is Steven Spielberg's first war-time masterpiece. Based on a true story, it follows an English boy named Jim (a young Christian Bale)ripped from his plush, white life in Shanghai and placed in a concentration camp run by Japanese during World War II. Jim grows up fast, from innocent wide-eyed choirboy to a tradesman who knows the value of a dying man's golf shoes. There is so much death.

Bale is phenomenal, showing a huge talent in playing a boy becoming a man, still young enough to cry because he can't remember what his parents look like. "Sun" is built entirely around Jim's perspective -- no politics, grandstanding or war room scenes. If Jim doesn't directly see and experience it, we don't either. A scene of Jim finding his mother's bedroom ransacked, with footprints and finger scratches in talcum powder is startling -- he has no idea what has happened. He's too young to get it. We do. That's the beautiful horror of this film.

This is Spielberg's first great film about a child losing his innocence, and there's no cute alien here to save him. So what if the film has one too many wet-dream cinematic shots of flaming planes. Spielberg is firing on every cylinder here, testing out his mettle before diving into far darker, more adult far in 1993. And as "Schindler's List" is my favorite film of 1993, this is my favorite film of 1987. A