Ender's Game

As a film, Ender's Game is long on spectacle and special effects, and short on just about everything else we go to the movies for.  This is a watchable, yet rushed adaptation of Orson Scott Card's 1985 Sci-Fi story that gets all the technical details right (the movie does look great), but just has absolutely no emotional depth, or sense of time.  The events in the film almost seem to fly by in the span of a couple weeks, when we know in reality, it is supposed to be covering many months, if not years in the lives of these characters.

Writer-Director Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) obviously spared no expense in bringing his vision to the screen.  The zero-gravity combat games that the kids play in order to train for battle are pulled off beautifully here, and the space battles (which seem to include hundreds of individual starships at times) look appropriately epic and filled with detail.  Best of all, the filmmakers have actually decided to forgo 3D, so not only do you not have to wear those stupid glasses in order to enjoy this movie, but you get all the crisp colors and detailed images you could want.  Too bad the storytelling, characters, and acting didn't receive the same care or attention.  If they had, this would have been extraordinary.   Instead, the screenplay races us through the narrative, and barely touches on the characters and their personalities. 

The story is set in an unspecified time in the future, where we learn that 50 years ago, Earth was invaded by an insect-like race of aliens that nearly succeeded in wiping out all life, until the heroic efforts of a noble pilot won the war and saved humanity.  Ever since that day, Earth has been preparing for another strike from the invaders, and is determined not to be caught off guard again.  The military trains preteen boys and girls for war in simulators that kind of look like video games, but are actually designed to determine the child's decision-making abilities and their survival instincts in the heat of intergalactic battle.  Our young hero, Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), has been deemed the best and the brightest of his class by his overseers, the gruff Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), and the concerned Major Anderson (Viola Davis), who has reservations about this program of training children to kill.

Pretty much from the moment they're introduced, both Graff and Anderson see Ender as their big hope, and immediately set the kid on the fast-track to advance through the military ranks.  They come to this decision through a variety of ways, such as how he plays the simulation game, and also how he handles a situation at school where he's confronted by some bullies. (All the kids in this program have monitoring devices on the back of their necks, so that the higher ups can watch them closely.) Ender is plucked from the school program, and sent into space where he begins battle training with a few other select kids.  We see Ender advance in rank quite quickly - a bit too quickly, I think.  It seems that within hours of arriving at the space station, the kid is picking up on everything in a flash, and before we know it, he's getting the chance to lead his own team.

We get to meet some of the other kids in the program, including Ender's jealous rival, Bonzo (Moises Arias), and female cadet Petra (Hailee Steinfeld), who becomes the closest thing he has to a best friend.  But thanks to the rushed tone of the screenplay, nobody comes across as being fully developed, or all that deep.  Even the young titular hero never comes across as anything more than a kid who just happens to excel at just about everything he does.  There's a subplot concerning Ender having a very close relationship with his sister back on Earth, Valentine (Abigail Breslin), but even this is simply glossed over in the film, and never has the emotional resonance that it should.  Speaking of Ender's family, I think he's supposed to have an antagonistic relationship with his older brother, who is frequently violent with him.  But once again, this element is barely touched on.  It feels like it's important to the main character (the other characters keep on bringing up his strained relationship with his brother), but because the movie treats it so haphazardly, it doesn't come across as being very clear.

Another aspect that Ender's Game is frustratingly vague on is why exactly all the military higher ups are so dead-set on this kid being the end-all be-all last great hope.  Yeah, he's obviously very smart and strategic in battle, but surely he can't be the only one.  The way this movie is written, the whole program would probably fall apart if Ender was not there to give orders to the other kids.  The movie rushes right on ahead, hitting the major beats of Card's novel, yet sometimes skipping over entirely why these things are happening in the first place.  I think the rushed tone actually lessens the impact that a lot of these characters and plot developments should have.  Even the film's big climactic reveal seems oddly underplayed, when it should be a crucial turning point for the lead character.  If nothing resonates in this movie, it's only because the movie itself doesn't slow down long enough for anything to resonate with us.

And yet, Ender's Game is not a terrible movie.  I actually kind of got involved in the story once it started to get going.  Even when I was involved, however, I still found myself irritated by the hurried pace.  It's been said that author Orson Scott Card has been very protective about selling the rights to his story to Hollywood.  If this is true, one of his demands should have been a slightly longer running time, so we could truly savor the ideas his story holds.

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