Christian Bale's Greatest Performance Is in a Spielberg WWII Drama You've Never Heard Of

2 weeks ago 13

Published May 30, 2026, 1:28 PM EDT

Nate Williams is a longtime tech and entertainment writer based in the Midwest. He covers movies and TV for Collider. Since 2016, his work has appeared on such sites as MakeUseOf, SlashGear, and ComingSoon.net, among others. When not actively working, you'll likely find him seeing a new movie or reading an old book. (Or vice versa.)

When someone says they love Christian Bale, they’re usually talking about one of just a handful of films. American Psycho is front-of-mind for a lot of people, being the film that turned him into a cult icon. The Dark Knight is another, with his performance as Batman still considered the gold standard for many. Then there’s The Fighter, The Machinist, and recent standout Ford v Ferrari… the list goes on. But Bale’s finest work isn’t any one of these. Truth be told, it came long before any of those movies even existed. When Bale was just 13 years old, he delivered one of the most emotionally staggering performances of the 1980s — not to mention his career — in Empire of the Sun. Nearly four decades later, it stands as some of the clearest proof that Bale has always operated on another level — even as a kid.

'Empire of the Sun' Blends Spielberg's Childhood Wonder With the Brutality of War

Steven Spielberg’s underseen World War II epic was released in 1987, just a couple of years after his most mature film to date: The Color Purple. To be hit with a pair of such heavy dramas straight off a run of crowd-pleasers including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was a bit of a shock. After all, this is a war drama centered almost entirely on a child’s psychological unraveling. It’s a far cry from the fun Spielberg moviegoers thought they knew. Though it was largely critically respected, Empire of the Sun underperformed commercially and has remained somewhat overlooked within Spielberg’s — and Bale’s — filmography ever since.

The film follows Jamie “Jim” Graham, a privileged British schoolboy living in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II. After being separated from his parents during the chaos following Pearl Harbor, Jim is forced to survive on his own before eventually ending up in a Japanese internment camp. As distant as it sounds from all his sci-fi films or his action-adventure romps, it’s a premise that sounds almost tailor-made for Spielberg: a child’s perspective on the spectacle of war.

He weaponizes that childhood innocence in fascinating ways, too: Jim sees fighter planes as these awe-inspiring things before he understands they’re instruments of death. He looks up to soldiers before recognizing the cruelty they unleash. That naivety gives the film a haunting quality few other Spielberg movies possess. The result is something unusually bleak for Spielberg in the 1980s. It also gives the film surprising similarities to a couple of great international war movies that also explore childhood trauma: Ivan's Childhood and Come and See. Like those films, Empire of the Sun becomes less about combat and more about watching war fundamentally distort a child’s understanding of the world. Spielberg approaches it through a more polished Hollywood lens, of course, but the emotional devastation underneath isn’t all that different.

Christian Bale's Performance Is One of the Best Child Performances Ever Put on Screen

Spielberg is movie magic personified, but not even that would be enough to pull this film off without a great actor in the leading role. What makes Empire of the Sun work at all is Bale. Without him, the movie collapses under the weight of its massive scale and delicate tone. Luckily, he carries the part with astonishing confidence — especially for his age. The crew reportedly auditioned more than 4,000 child actors before casting Bale, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone else as Jim.

Today, Empire of the Sun feels long overdue for reappraisal. It may have been a box office flop, and it might not have the immediate cultural footprint of Spielberg’s biggest hits, but it still contains some of his most impressive direction and one of the strongest performances Bale has ever given. He avoids the exaggerated sentimentality that often drags down child performances in prestige dramas. He doesn’t behave like a movie version of a traumatized kid. He actually feels real, and it’s devastating precisely because Spielberg refuses to soften the psychological damage war has inflicted on his lead. That’s an incredibly difficult thing for a child performer to pull off, especially in a film this emotionally demanding. For all the acclaim he’s earned as an adult, it’s remarkable that this tour de force still hasn’t received its due.