Enders Game

Can a classic science fiction novel is made into a hollywood film?  Is there a chance they can make it right?   I will say that the novel itself is a book I adored as a teen, and still like as an adult.   It is also a special effects tour de force, so I will have a few images for the readers.  Here is my review of Enders Game (2013) the surprisingly decent and fascist telling of a beloved Science Fiction novel of the same name.


Movie: Enders Game (2013)
Rating: PG-13

Starring: Asa Butterfield as Ender Wiggin, Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, Hailee Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian, and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham.
Score: 6.8 out of 10 stars
Family Friendly: 3.5/5 (violence)
Recommended: Anyone who has read he book first

 Plot Summery (No Spoilers)




Ender Wiggin, a schoolboy, is the selected in the near future for training to fight aliens who stuck earth, and earth is looking for a commander... 

Plot Summery (Spoilers)

 Earth was attacked, and a hero, Mazer Rackham, rams his ship into the mothership of the aliens and stops the attack, and earth begins to build a fleet of ships and militarizes.  Ender Wiggin is a smart, smallish boy who has potential for the earth's defense force (the International fleet) and when faced with a bully, not only defeats him, he beats him so that he will never threaten Ender again.   This turns out to be the last test for Ender, and he is promoted to Battle school.  

Battle school is the core of the film.   Battle school takes place on a space station above the earth, with children (young  teens in the case of the movies) are trained for a future in the military.  Of course, some of the best training for kids is games, and two of the games are noteworthy, A laser-tag like game, and a computer game to test the students mental state. 

The laser-tag like game consists of a zero-gravity area and if the player is hit by a laser, he becomes frozen.   Ender quickly shows his leadership and tactical abilities in the game, being promoted up to new teams, meeting friends and enemies, and finally obtaining his own team. 

 The computer game consists of variang challenges, including a challenge that the player is not supposed to win, with a Giant asking a player, who currently a mouse, to drink one of two cups.   Both are poison, and its to see how the students react to not being able to win.   Ender figures out a third way to get past this challenge.

Then we get to the end of the battle-school a rival (Bonzo) of Ender confronts him in the shower.  Ender proceeds to win the fight, but Bonzo hits his head and is killed.   This leads to him being promoted and sent to Command School.

At command school, he is presented with another game, a accurate simulation of the upcoming war with the aliens, and meets a unexpected teacher,  Mazer Rackham who stopped the last invasion has been kept alive so that he might teach his successor,  Ender and his troop of follow kids start to play the game.  

This leads to the climatic battle, where Ender seeing that he has a near hopeless situation,  sacrifices everything to carry out a suicide strike on the alien planet, killing all the alien queens.  He thinks he won the game, till he finds out that he won the war.   It wasn't really a game.


Ender is smart enough to know that he really is not a hero, but a Genocidal evil kid, and is horrified.   His boss Graff is of course overjoyed that Ender was able to make the tough choices.   And Ender flips out.  

He is called by dreams to explore a area, and finds the last queen, who is dying, however she has one egg left, and Ender with Xonocidal guilt, agrees to take the egg and find a world where the alien race can live again. 



My thoughts:  I was planning on bashing the film, as it is disappointing to the books.  Still it is a solid movie that is enjoyable.   It has some strong points.  The visual effects and the acting ability of the cast (including the child actors) is superb.   However the need to cram a ton of plot into a marketable movie means that the plot, which is more then solid, does not have the time for you to buy as a viewer on why Ender is accepted as a leader.   This is a critical flaw.  In addition, the Aliens, which are a key concept to understand the plot, and not really discussed till late in the movie.

I will start on the actors.   The major "kid" actors are excellent.   Butterfeild, Hailee Steinfeld
 (Most famous as the girl from "true grit") and Abigail Breastlin (famous for Little Miss Sunshine) all do amazing jobs.   The other child actors do yeoman work.  

One major plot point that is dropped from the movies from the book is Enders sister and brother.   Both are products of the earth eugenic program to create the commander that Earth needs, but Peter is a sociopath, and his sister Valentine is too nice.   In the books they become bloggers who change the world.   (To be fair, the novel is from 1984 and predicts the internet, the jump to security over freedoms, children's love of video games, and other issues.   I can accept that the writer had too much belief in blogging.)


There is a theme of Fascism.  Seeing kids being trained from a young age to march off to war and to fight does launch some sectors of your brain that normally do not get fired.   Also it is clear that the earth's government is clearly highly militarized and it does lead to genocide.

   

In most movies, the kid actors is what leads to the failure of the movie.  In Enders Game, it the adult actors who fail to carry the water as it seems that they do not have the star power or taking the material seriously unlike the kids.    It quite surprising, and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham is phoning it in the movie, hoping his odd choice of tribal tattoos would overlook his not trying.

In the end, this is a solid movie.  It does have some pace issues.  It screams as two part movie, or better yet, a HBO style miniseries to let the material breath and let the world that Ender lives in breath and come to life.   

Also, the person requesting that I review Enders Game requested that I discuss the Latter Day Saint angle of Enders Game.   Unlike some of Orson Scott Cards books, this does not have a heavy Mormon influence.   (Both the blogger and the writer of the book Enders Game are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - AKA Mormon)  I am also aware aware that some homosexuals protested this film as the writer is opposed to Gay Marriage. (Insert joke pointing out that one of the key moments of the book is two naked male teens wrestling all lathered up in a hot shower).   After some thought I could come up with only two concepts that have some sort of Mormon influence.   One is that while Ender is set up as a "savior" Christ like figure at first, he chooses violence as the answer, and only later sees that redemption comes from peace and reconciliation.   This is a common Christian theme, and is not exclusive to Mormons.   In addition Enders dreams leadinding him to find infomation and taking actions that directly save him is a very Latter Day Saint concept, and most likely is the strongest Latter Day Saint influence. 

Still, the book is excellent, (and the sequel, Speaker for the Dead is a all time classic) and the movie is enjoyable as both popcorn fare, and also as a strong, if flawed telling of the novel.