Adapting Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game would be a daunting task for any filmmaker, least of all for writer-director Gavin Hood, who’s responsible for the much-maligned X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
For a movie truly to do the novel justice, it would have to be close to the greatest film ever made. Not because Ender’s Game is a masterpiece but because Card’s dystopia is so weird, dense and utterly divorced from childhood reality that a movie successfully reconciling all the contradictions would be nothing short of a miracle.
No 6-year-old in the world could spout Card’s florid kid-talk in front of a camera. Heck, even the teenage actors in the film aren’t up to the task. Line readings feel distinctly off throughout the entire film. Even the best child performances in the movie frequently feature stilted and otherwise pained dialogue.
Bean, played by The Dark Knight Rises’s Aramis Knight, suffers the worst — every time Knight opens his mouth, Ender’s Game suddenly turns into the most expensive All That skit ever produced — but no one in the teen cast is consistently confident, and they aren’t helped by the movie’s breakneck pace.
If you haven’t read Ender’s Game, don’t expect to understand everything in the movie. Watching Ender’s Game is not so much experiencing the CliffsNotes version of the book as it is being bombarded by every single page of the book at once.
Humanity was attacked by an insectoid race of aliens called the Formics. We just barely managed to repel them the first time, and now we’re prepping for the second coming. The leaders of Earth’s military, represented in the movie by Harrison Ford’s (Paranoia) Colonel Graff, are desperately looking for someone to lead the next charge.
The preteen Ender Wiggin (Hugo’s now-adolescent Asa Butterfield) is perhaps the only person remotely qualified. He’s whisked away from his family and sent to an off-planet military academy creatively dubbed Battle School, where he trains by playing null-gravity war games. Not 20 minutes have elapsed.
The book is an unexpectedly dense work that spans an unexpectedly long stretch of time. Understandably, the movie decides to truncate the timeline — Ender is now already a preteen at the onset, and the whole training rigmarole lasts months, not years.
The film does move with admirable efficiency, but it’s simply too fast, especially at the start. Everything in the first 30 or so minutes leaves virtually no impact, no impression upon the audience because of how fast it all goes by. That the film eventually gets better is less because Hood slows down and more because you get used to how rapidly and jarringly Ender’s Game jumps from moment to moment.
This fast pace allows Ender’s Game to get through all of the book in less than two hours at the cost of much of the emotional resonance of Card’s book. Ender’s Game fails to devastate in the same way as the book, largely because Ender barely has enough time to register, let alone grow as a character, before the credits roll. Nothing that happens to Ender seems all that terrible or important because the film never relents, never allows us a moment to breathe and contemplate the weight and gravity of everything that has transpired.
On the other hand, Hood manages to carry over a surprising amount of the book’s thematic and symbolic heft. There’s an undeniable elegance and ingenuity to the way Ender’s Game the movie lays out the big ideas Card explored in his book.
Even though a lot of his iconic lines get short shrift (“The enemy’s gate is down” is presented without any meaningful context in the film), many of Card’s ideas are presented quite thoughtfully, especially for a movie of this budget. Hood even manages to refine some aspects of the story and the look of the film to better fit Ender’s Game into a modern context of video games and drone warfare.
That thoughtfulness is evident in much of the film’s design as well. Sets all look and behave as part of a convincing sci-fi world. The computer-generated effects blend seamlessly with the cold, digital cinematography to create appropriately thrilling and involving space action set pieces. Abysmal soundtrack aside, Ender’s Game may just have the best production value of any blockbuster this year this side of Gravity.
All told, Ender’s Game is a decent film. Is it good enough to be worthy of the book? No, but not every movie needs to save humanity from the buggers. Sometimes, a fun trip to the theater is all that’s needed.
