Geekscape Movie Reviews: ‘Ender’s Game’
Ender’s Game, based on the book by the same name written by the controversial Orson Scott Card, tries admirably to live up to the weight of expectations placed on it, and for the most part succeeds.
Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Rendition, Tsotsi) wrote the screenplay and directed the film, which stars Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, Viola Davis (The Help) as Major Anderson, Haliee Steinfeld (True Grit) as Petra and Asa Butterfield (Hugo) as the titular Ender.
Ender’s Game continues the trend this year of large, big-budget sci-fi films starting with a voiceover. Have we learned nothing from Blade Runner? Please, please, please, Hollywood, stop with the voice over. It only makes it worse, guys, it doesn’t help. As soon as the voice over goes, we automatically deduct two points because it’s just SO BAD. Not only that, but the movie will show us within the next ten minutes everything some disembodied voice just info-dumped on us anyway. So, come on, just try it, for, like, a year. We bet you’ll like it.
All right, sorry, back to the review.
The movie follows the basic plot of the book fairly faithfully–a near-future Earth, attacked by the alien race the Formics and almost defeated, fights back by training extremely young soldiers to fight, as only the young have brains with neural pathways fast enough to handle the new type of warfare they are waging.
Hood made the decision to compress the book–which covers six years, starting when Andrew Ender Wiggins is six and culminating when he is twelve–to one year, keeping Ender a static 12 years of age. While the choice allows the movie to move like a training-for-battle/brave-band-of-misfits film–which isn’t necessarily a detriment–it also removes that shock of a bunch of six-year-olds (who, if you don’t have one handy nearby to measure, are TINY. They can’t even play sports right, not even soccer, because running maxes out their coordination outputs.) not only being violent, but being trained to hone that violence. More than just a purely aesthetic issue, excising the very young from this story edits out a certain amount of visceral reaction to the world Ender lives in; it also makes Ender himself harder to relate to–in the movie, he is a sociopathic genius. In the book, he is made into one.
The film does a solid job of picking and choosing what bits from the book were required for the film–some scenes lifted verbatim, line for line, providing a little squee of joy for the fans of the book.
Asa Butterfield does a commendable job of Ender. Though he does occasionally wander over to the whiny side of the role, he mostly imbues the character with a vanishing innocence and hidden ferocity.
Ford is mostly likable as the military man following orders, who’s responsible for taking children and making them killers–he carries the weight on his shoulders and in his eyes, though his never-wavering belief in the program at times strains credulity. Davis–in a role originally written as a man–plays the psychologist and the moral center.
The producers and Hood spoke in depth about how the decided to make the role of the Major a women in order to make the move more up-to-date and gender inclusive. While certainly the attempt to make Ender’s Game more in keeping with today’s sensibilities–it was written nearly thirty years ago by a man who has always had extremely traditional (to put it mildly) opinions in terms of gender roles. But, we wondered why the only character to get the gender switch was the kind, nurturing, caring mother-figure? Surely Colonel Graff as a woman–a woman ordering children into battle–would have been a more effective casting choice, if we were really doing this to show how gender/color blind Hollywood has gotten. Or, hey, any of the ‘rulers of the Earth’ we see later on.
But we don’t. In fact, oddly enough, the movie suffers from more sexism than the book does. While certainly the book does not have any woman officers, the two main women in the novel–Petra and Valentine–are written as extremely strong, extremely bright, extremely effective characters. Valentine was removed from the Battle School program for being too compassionate, but she is instrumental on Earth in fomenting a revolution and putting into place a structure for after the war is won–all before she is 18. Petra is the only girl to make it through the brutal training program at Battle School and other than a brief mention that’s she’s a girl and therefore different–much like Ender is different–her gender is never really a point of discussion. By the end of the book she is the strongest platoon leader he has, with skills almost equal to Ender’s.
The movie boils Valentine down to a simpering girl who cries every time we see her, wears skirts all the time, and has a suspiciously close relationship with Ender (the movie does not dive into the older brother’s psychosis as much as the book, so people who aren’t familiar with the novel may be left wondering on some of the family dynamics) and Petra as a good-friend/love interest (?-there’s a lot of hand holding) who’s main job in the final battle is to push the giant button to fire the giant weapon–a weapon that must be protected by all the boy’s platoons because it is incapable of protecting itself. She is, quite literally, Sigourney Weaver’s character from Galaxy Quest. She sits there and repeats information the computer gives her.
A hint of this is given at the very beginning, when Sergeant Dap (an underwritten character portrayed with great heart by the wonderful Nonso Anozie) announces that there are girl’s and boy’s showers. In the book, there were not. In fact, when we first meet Petra she is naked, just coming from the shower–as are all of the other members of the Salamander Army she belongs to. This societal norm–there is no crucial difference–enforced from a young age, means that in the novel whether a person is a girl or boy has less impact then whether they are good or bad. The pitfall of making everyone twelve means that burgeoning hormones must be somehow contained and addressed, turning friendships and a certain brothers-in-arms camaraderie into a coming-of-age flirtation.
Hood also choose to delete the number of armies Ender is shuffled too, his after hours battle training with his friends, and, once he is promoted to Dragon Army, the various psychological tortures inflicted on him by Graff. The movie also doesn’t show the tactical genius of Ender, constantly using the strengths of others–and the loopholes only he can see–to exploit a weakness of the enemy. These things are important because from them we see Ender’s genius warped into a thing of greatness–at the expense of his humanity. Without those trails, the ending reads as a reaction of a spoilt child, rather then the breaking of a brilliant mind.
Towards the end this choice becomes especially unwieldy. Having not built into the movie the extreme psychological distress Ender and all of his team has already gone through, Hood then has to have numerous characters come out and tell us how close people are to breaking; how much stress they are under; how hard Ender is pushing his people. They also have to tell us the strengths of each of his trusted platoon leaders, mostly because Hood never took the time to show us. The ending, while making sure to hit all the same beats as the book, does so with small but significant changes–played on a snare drum, if you would, rather than a timpani.
The movie is visually stunning, thanks to digital effects group Digital Domain, who were brought in early in pre-production to help bring the near-future surroundings to life. Fans of the book shouldn’t find much to criticize in the aesthetic of Ender’s world–the Battle School, the war games room, the cubes, well everything, were thoroughly realized and were exactly what we imagined when we first read the novel. Even the Formic’s–the vaguely ant-like race whose invasion 50 years ago sparked the need for the International Fleet and the battle school training program–are brought to life with an eerie, inhuman and intrinsically different-from-us visuals which still manages to impart a feeling of grace and intelligence while maintaining a strong, creepy sense of other.
The movie, on it’s own, moves. The acting is good, with occasional flares into great, and the plot moves quickly from point to point. While it may have missed one or two of the truly harrowing social commentaries in the book, it’s still a larger-than-life, good-guys-fighting-the-good-fight space opera that stays exciting and entertaining until the credits roll.
Ender’s Game opened wide on Friday, November 1st.
Geekscape Score: 3.5/5
