FILM REVIEWS: Ender's Game

To all those who say that the adventure/sci-fi genre is dead... I point you to Ender’s Game. Although it’s light-years (no pun intended) behind the best Star Wars and Star Trek films, and doesn’t have any of the great performances of Gravity, Blade Runner, or Alien, this old-school summer-action-style adventure is still a lot of fun. There’s nothing here that will challenge your mind, nothing that will make you think, and not much in the way of a memorable plot... but in comparison to some of the shit we’ve been getting this year, this is a welcome and pleasant surprise.

Ender’s Game is the film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Orson Scott Card, a project that has been anticipated and hinted at for years. Having read the book, I knew the plot twists and spoilers beforehand, making the movie not too original for me. However, if you HAVEN’T read the book, this movie is a fun (if predictable) thrill ride that will entertain you immensely if you’re willing to sit back and turn off your brain for a couple hours. And to address the detractors of Mr. Card: Yes, the author of the original novel is a flaming asshole who thinks that homosexuality is an abomination. But there’s a thing called “Separating the art from the man.” Roman Polanski, Clint Eastwood, and Morgan Freeman have all done objectionable things off-camera, but that doesn’t make their movies any less enjoyable. Boycotts are lame. Get over it.

Ender’s Game stars that little asswipe from Hugo as Ender Wiggin, a cadet for the Generic Future-Space Military Academy Thingamajig. Simply put, the character is awesome, but the actor sucks. Assa Buttholefield has never delivered a good performance, and this is just another fine example of that. He’s bland, cold, and there’s nothing about him that makes you think that he has a soul of any kind. His emotional scenes feel blank, and the plot makes him out to be some kind of robot. The character is NOT. He is conflicted about the morality of his actions, and that results in a twist ending and spectacular climax that the movie failed to adapt from the book. It’s a disappointment, yes, but the rest of the movie is good enough to hold him up.

Harrison Ford plays the Generic Army Colonel/General Badass Old Guy who enlists Ender (what the fuck kind of a name is Ender anyway?) to travel to space for battle school. This is the best part of the movie, as all of the visuals in these scenes looked exactly as I had imagined them when I read the book as a kid. There’s a general sense of sweeping grandeur, awe, and fantasticalness that contributes greatly to the movie’s storytelling. Rarely do visuals actually play a role in this, but they definitely do in Ender’s Game. And Ford is awesome as always in this, helped along by Ben Kingsley (who is also guilty of being in that enormous fuckfest that is Hugo), who delivers one of his better performances from recent memory. Of course, I can’t watch him onscreen anymore without thinking “This guy was in Species... heh heh.” But that’s just me.

When the final plot twist rolls around, you’re pretty much hooked, because even if the central performance isn’t too strong, the dialogue is taken (sometimes word-for-word) from the book, making it a lot better than anything the writers of this thing could probably have come up with. The battle scenes between Ender and the Formics (originally called “Buggers” in the book; the name was changed because it was considered offensive) are beautifully shot, technically brilliant, and awe-inspiring. But here is where the movie fails: Although it looks great, the acting is passable, and the dialogue is good, it still doesn’t quite transfer the magic of the book to the screen. It has action without depth, dialogue without a point, and characters without hearts. It’s a fun yet joyless experience that, sadly, doesn’t live up to its source material.

Final Score for Ender’s Game: 6/10 stars. A fun movie no matter how you slice it, but the more you think about it after leaving the theater, the less you like it. And if you have some reservations about Card’s beliefs, I wouldn’t recommend it, because frankly, it’s not worth it. He won’t be getting any of the box office, but if this movie is successful enough, the producers will undoubtedly pick it up as a franchise and begin working on the sequels-- Three of them. It’s a fun summer blockbuster that, for some reason, came out in November. Nothing more, nothing less. Purists will hate it, casual fans will love it, and they’re both right and wrong, because all it is is terribly mediocre.