Ender’s Game adapts one of the seminal sci-fi stories of the 80s. The decades since its publication has yielded a lot of controversy over the views of its author, Orson Scott Card, but the story has largely remained lauded. It remains a strangely prescient work that seemed to foretell contemporary warfare, which has depersonalized enemy combatants through the use of remote piloted drone strikes. The film gets to its themes in clumsy ways, but it delivers this plot effectively and with just a bit of visual panache.
The film takes place decades after an alien force invaded the Earth and killed millions. The world’s smartest children are put into a program in order to find prodigies that can command the military fleets in space. Twelve-year-old Ender Wiggin is one of these candidates, and after a violent encounter with a bully, the head of the program, Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), decides that the child is ready for battle school. Ender takes part in a grueling training program that has him squaring off with the planet’s most talented children, all in preparation for all-out war with a mysterious enemy.
The movie compresses the novel into two distinct movements. The first half is kind of a twisted version of a high school movie, with the brainy Ender basically trying to figure out how to get kids to like him within a harsh, military context. The second half deals with the war itself, but it does so in a completely abstracted way that offers few of the conventional pleasures associated with big VFX spectacles. And it kind of works, on a purely technical level. Gavin Hood’s efficient adaptation moves the story at a breakneck pace, and appealing visuals keep things interesting even if there isn’t a lot of action going on.
But the weaknesses of the original story remain. The themes remain intriguing: the story was really prescient for its time, the idea of using games to desensitize young people from the horrors of war having become terrible reality in recent years. But the actual components of the story are still a little clunky. None of the characters have any real personalities. They’re all defined by singular traits, and are never given a chance to develop or to even exhibit more human qualities. And though the themes are strong, the movie often refuses to let it remain subtext, with many clumsy scenes that feature characters basically speaking it all out loud.
The film inherits a lack of subtlety from the source material, but it’s amplified in this truncated form. This is especially felt in the film’s epilogue, which scrambles to hit its next thematic point at the cost of the deep drama that had just occurred in the film’s climax. The acting presents a couple of problems as well. Asa Butterfield seems to play Ender with too serious an edge. He comes off as robotic, which presents problems as the film asks the audience to sympathize with the character. Harrison Ford and Viola Davis offer little in the way of subtlety as well, their performances constrained by the one-note natures of their characters.
Ender’s Game is still a deft little movie in the end. Ignoring for a second how it handles its headier themes, it’s an efficient little sci-fi movie that does manage to get its points across in a brisk, efficient manner. Its appealing aesthetics and sense of design manage to keep things entertaining even as characters have long conversations discussing the themes of the story. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, but one must give the film credit for how efficiently it puts this story together on screen.
My Rating:
