ENDER'S GAME

Ender’s Game (2013)
Grade: B+

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley, Aramis Knight, Moises Arias and Nonso Anozie

Premise: An intellectually-gifted boy is selected for membership at a school designed to train combat commanders. As he moves through the ranks, he comes to realize he may be humanity's only hope in the upcoming war with a powerful alien race.

Rated PG-13 for intense action and violent content, and some disturbing images

Rarely have I been so undecided and unsure of my feelings after one viewing of a movie as I was after I saw Ender’s Game last Thursday night. I’d been looking forward to seeing it for some time, but between being tired at the end of a long work day, and being unable to keep comparisons to the book (which I have read) out of my head, I didn’t quite know what to think. Immediately, I knew I’d need a second viewing. After all, it seemed to be a pretty faithful adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s enduringly-popular science fiction epic, and I’m somebody who traditionally hates movie adaptations of books because they tend to alter details. Yet I’m not a complete devotee of the book like some of my friends are, so I could watch the movie for the movie (this has memorably not been my mindset for movies past; so I've had some pretty vindictive responses to the likes of Harry Potter and Silver Linings Playbook for differing from their source material).

Well, after seeing Ender's Game again last night, I was roundly impressed. It’s unquestionably one of the most faithful big-screen adaptations of a book I’ve ever seen. Showing a flair for stunning visuals and giving tight focus to a few key characterizations, writer/director Gavin Hood’s film is a well-paced and well-acted adventure that really, above all, is a study of one boy’s very human heart.

Plot

Some fifty years after Earth was nearly conquered by an insectoid alien race called Formics, the world’s leaders have adopted a program in which gifted children are sent to special military schools and trained to think like military leaders. Some of them are even fitted with a cerebral monitor that allows government personnel in distant telecommunications rooms to see what they’re seeing, hear what they’re hearing, and see if they might have the temperament and habits to be a great leader. Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin (the very good Asa Butterfield) is one such boy, the third in his family to be ‘monitored’. His sweetheart sister, Valentine (Abigail Breslin), failed out of the ‘monitor’ program and the chance to go to an elite ‘battle school’ because she was too compassionate; his brother Peter (Jimmy Pinchak) failed because he was too aggressive. Ender might be smarter than either of them, but he doesn’t seem to have the guile to be a great military leader. But when he beats the tar out of a bigger, tougher classmate who mocks him for appearing to have failed out of the monitoring program early on, a gruff, no-nonsense colonel by the name of Graff (Harrison Ford) likes what he sees.

Suddenly, Ender’s whisked away to battle school, a fascinating, floating fortress in space where kids are separated into Armies, live like real military recruits, and practice fighting techniques and battle strategy during zero-gravity face-offs with freeze-ray guns. Ender’s shy and skinny, but he has heart, and brains. He sees things others don’t, as Graff is quick to point out. With his quick intellect, he can out-think people, whether that’s dissing class bullies, out-talking a blustering drill sergeant (Nonso Anozie), subverting enemy maneuvers or proving a better strategist, and fiercer fighter, than even his hard-nosed Army commander (Moises Arias). He soon has an Army of his own, which includes treasured allies like the cocksure Bean (Aramis Knight), warmly-supportive Petra (Hailee Steinfeld), and quietly-encouraging Alai (Suraj Partha). He’s soon being shadowed by Graff, mentored by the great leader who stopped the last Formic invasion (Ben Kingsley), and being groomed for eventual military command. But, no matter how many ‘battles’ he wins, no matter how much ‘fighting’ he does, and despite his knack for taking out the people who really push him, Ender isn’t sure he wants to be at the forefront of a destructive fighting force. By and large, he’s more afraid of the darkness in his own heart—what he, personally, is capable of—than of any so-called enemy race.

What Works?

Ender’s Game moves quickly—a trip to the bathroom or concessions mid-scene may leave you lost when you return—but if you focus too obsessively on the story and the dialogue, you might miss the fact that this movie is gorgeous to look at. Gavin Hood and his teams of special effects experts have created a spectacle that’s utterly beyond reproach, and deserves mention alongside the likes of Avatar, Life of Pi and Gravity as top-of-the-line cinematic eye candy. Whether you’re talking about the battle room—with its elaborate spherical design, floating obstacles, streamlined fight suits and immobilizing ray guns—the floating battle school as a whole, or space battles in which fleets of high-tech spacecraft are surrounded by gargantuan swarms of attacking fighters, Game is filled with stunning sights. One throwaway shot as impressive as any is the night-time launch of a space shuttle, its afterburners providing the only light, and its ascent accentuated by snow glistening on the mountains behind it.

The acting is uniformly fine, starting with Ender himself. Asa Butterfield proved himself capable of carrying a movie of real dramatic weight two years ago in Hugo, and here, given some great material by Gavin Hood, he gives an impressive, well-rounded performance. Though Ender can think and reason like the smartest adults (you can all but see the wheels in his head turning scene after scene), he’s still a child—homesick, afraid, and horrified and disgusted by what he sometimes does under pressure. With his big, expressive eyes, Butterfield emotes fearlessly and effectively, reminding us constantly that Ender is no robot. On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum is Colonel Graff, played by sci-fi legend Ford as essentially the opposite of the actor’s typical devil-may-care types. Graff has a core of hard, cold steel, and the lack of humor or whimsy of a man who’s spent his entire life preparing, dead-seriously, for war; yet from that fighting-man’s approach comes a reverence for his young prodigy, when it becomes clear Ender might have “the stuff”. He doesn’t care whether war might claim Ender or anyone else’s life (“what does it matter if there’s nothing left?” he snarls at one point to a subordinate), but he cares obsessively about getting him there, because he sees Ender as the One Thing that might just save humanity. It’s a fine, fully-committed performance.

I’ve already heard a lot of murmuring by devotees of Card’s book that most of the supporting roles have been cut so thin by Hood’s screenplay that they aren’t very faithful to the book, or else have been majorly cheated, but that’s not a surprise in cutting a dense 250-plus page book down to a two-hour movie. The actors in those roles commit themselves well, though, no matter the screen-time. Viola Davis is solid (no surprise there) as a more empathetic military officer, Abigail Breslin convincingly portrays Valentine’s gentleness and sweetness, which a violence-hating person like Ender craves in his life, Moises Arias commands the screen as hateful Army commander Bonzo Madrid, and Aramis Knight brings down the house with one of Bean’s most hilariously-cutting comeback lines.

 What Doesn’t Work?

Though Ender’s Game is neither a monsters-in-space movie (a la Alien and Prometheus) nor a space-based action extravaganza (Star Wars, Star Trek), it’s still consistently entertaining, bringing lots of strategy and intrigue to the screen as it builds to the spectacular final battle. Most of my criticisms of the film are nit-picks, like the fact that Ender’s blustering drill sergeant is a hammy cliché, despite a committed performance by the hulking Nonso Anozie. But despite the generally stimulating onscreen developments in this adaptation, two scenes resonate with me as not quite complete. One involves the great Ben Kingsley, whose third-act appearance is hampered by his character’s borderline-unintelligible Australian accent. There's a scene in which he tries to explain to Ender his unique facial tattoos, but after two viewings, I still don’t have a clue what he said (and it sounded important). The other scene is a late-in-the-running-time meeting between Ender and one of the Formics. Throughout all his strategizing and simulated battles, Ender has been yearning to know his enemy, and this scene, while bookended by sort-of-descriptive voiceovers, still lacks something (this is one of the times where knowing the book's additional detail will seriously be of assistance to viewers). The Formics can’t speak, but there appears to be an attempt to communicate, but without any words—even voiceover—you just have to assume what went on. I wanted something more, mainly because the book’s poignant, thoughtful ending was my favorite part.

 The Bottom Line

I don’t think Ender’s Game the movie is going to be a real widespread crowd-pleaser, but as someone who was mildly familiar with the book, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s visually astonishing, has a few good laughs and some spectacular battles (the strategies Ender uses in battle, as they did in Card’s book, have a way of making you feel smarter just for seeing and understanding them). But the film, like the book, really boils down to a realistic and intimate psychological portrait, where a child with a genius adult’s mind and knack for strategy struggles to hold onto his innocence, and to reason with the increasingly cold, bleak world around him. In Ender I see the struggle against violence and darkness and callousness we all experience, and the movie’s better for it. A well-acted, marvelously-put together sci-fi adventure piece with a conscience? Sounds like a movie I’ll watch again.

Ender’s Game (2013)

Written for the Screen and Directed by Gavin Hood
Based on the novel “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
Rated PG-13
Length: 114 minutes