'Empire of the Sun' (Published 1987) (2024)

GOD playing tennis: that's what Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a privileged British schoolboy living in high colonial style in the pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai of 1941, sees in one of his dreams. God taking a photograph: Jim thinks he sees that four years and seemingly several lifetimes later, as a starving, exhausted prisoner witnessing the brilliant light of the atomic bomb.

What transpires in between, the sweeping story of Jim's wartime exploits after he is separated from his family, is set forth so spectacularly in Steven Spielberg's ''Empire of the Sun'' that the film seems to speak a language all its own. In fact it does, for it's clear Mr. Spielberg works in a purely cinematic idiom that is quite singular. Art and artifice play equal parts in the telling of this tale. And the latter, even though intrusive at times, is part and parcel of the film's overriding style.

Yes, when Jim crawls through swampy waters he emerges covered with movie mud, the makeup man's kind; when he hits his head, he bleeds movie blood. It's hard not to be distracted by such things. But it's also hard to be deterred by them, since that same movie-conscious spirit in Mr. Spielberg gives ''Empire of the Sun'' a visual splendor, a heroic adventurousness and an immense scope that make it unforgettable.

There are sections of ''Empire of the Sun'' that are so visually expressive they barely require dialogue (although Tom Stoppard's screenplay, which streamlines J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, is often crisp and clever). Its first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film -an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai's last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding. Jim is first seen singing in a church choir (the Welsh hymn ''Suo Gan'' will echo again hauntingly later in the story), then gliding through crowded streets in his family's chauffeur-driven Packard. At home, he asks his parents off-handed questions about the coming war. When the three of them, elaborately costumed, heedlessly leave home for a party on the other side of the city, it's clear that their days there are numbered just from the way the Chinese servants wave goodbye.

That first glimpse of the choirboys will prompt audiences to wonder which of these well-groomed, proper little singers is to be the film's leading man. Mr. Bale, who emerges from the choir by singing a solo, at first seems just a handsome and malleable young performer, another charming child star. But the epic street scene that details the Japanese invasion of the city and separates Jim from his parents reveals this boy to be something more. As Mr. Bale, standing atop a car amid thousands of extras and clasping his hands to his head, registers the fact that Jim is suddenly alone, he conveys the schoolboy's real terror and takes the film to a different dramatic plane. This fine young actor, who appears in virtually every frame of the film and ages convincingly from about 9 to 13 during the course of the story, is eminently able to handle an ambitious and demanding role.

Once ''Empire of the Sun,'' which opens today at the National and other theaters, follows Jim to the prison camp where he spends the duration of the war, it becomes slightly less focused. The pattern of events that occur within the camp is at times difficult to follow, in part because the emphasis is divided equally among so many different characters and episodes. When Mr. Spielberg - again, working almost without dialogue - outlines Jim's growing friendship with a Japanese boy from the airfield that adjoins the prison camp, or demonstrates Jim's profound respect for the Japanese pilots he sees there, the film takes on the larger-than-life emotional immediacy it seems designed for. But other episodes are less sharply defined. When Jim, who has proudly won his right to live in the American barracks, returns to the British camp in which he formerly lived, it takes a moment to remember why he's back - not because the motive is unclear, but because his departure from the one place and return to the other are separated by intervening scenes.