War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Pacific War on film.

We are humming along here. This is the second to the last film that we are going to discuss.

I'm your host, James Early, as always.

And also, as always, I have my co-host and my good buddy, Sean McIver. Sean, say hi to the people.

Hello. Hello, people. Hello, listeners. Hello, people of earth. We, this is the second film about prisoners of war that we're going to be discussing,

and there are a lot of prisoner of war films. And we thought about doing more, but we decided

to focus on these two, which are probably the best two there are out there. And last week,

of course, we discussed the classic film from 1957, Bridge on the River Kwai.

One of the few films in the series that we both gave a five-star rating to.

I think Mr. Roberts was the only other one.

This week, we are going to discuss the 1987 Stephen Spielberg film Empire of the Sun.

So let's talk about, as we always do, the basics, some of the just basic information about it.

And then Sean is going to dig a little deeper and tell us a little bit of the background behind it and just more cool information like Sean always does.

So the length is two hours and 34 minutes. And Rotten Tomatoes is interesting on this one.

We have an average positive rating among the critics of only 75%. I mean, that's not bad, but that's

not fantastic either. But the audience or the fans gave it 90%. So it's a real crowd pleaser, more so than it is a

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