Possible parallel with 'Empire of the Sun'

I find it relatively interesting that Bale's character in Spielberg's 1987 gem, "Empire of the Sun", is also named Jim. I say this because the film, an exceedingly tough coming of age story set in Shanghai amidst World War II, ends, along with the war, on a markedly open-ended note; perhaps suggesting that Christian's character would indeed suffer through considerable post traumatic stress disorder, which is the state of mind in which our other Jim, in another time and place, begins his tragic downfall in "Harsh Times." In a way, the latter film picks up where the other left off: a man-child (I can relate) damaged by a war won only in the collective sense, reentering society on particularly uncertain and edgy terms....That in one film he served as a soldier, in the other (in both, truthfully) as a prisoner of it, is largely irrelevant. Either way, the damage to the Jims was done, and those who've seen "Harsh Times", know the end result. Wonderfully bleak. That having been said, perhaps the likenesses are entirely conincidental, but I'd certainly like to entertain the notion that David Ayer knew precisely what he was doing.

“It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.”-Charlie Brown