Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.1.13
Celebrated sci-fi author Orson
Scott Card was 26 when his first work, a novella titled “Ender’s Game,” was
published in the August 1977 issue of Analog. In 1985, with much more ambitious
plans for that tale’s young protagonist — and with the security of a rapidly
blossoming literary career — Card expanded his debut effort into a novel that
won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Today, the so-called “Ender
series” encompasses — are you sitting down? — a dozen novels, a dozen short
stories and roughly four dozen comic books (some adapting existing novels, some
with entirely new material).
Obviously, fans can’t get enough.
More significantly, for our
purposes, those same fans — and the general public — will thoroughly enjoy
director/scripter Gavin Hood’s big-screen adaptation of the novel that started
it all.
The South African-born filmmaker
is an impressively shrewd choice for this material, having burst onto the scene
with 2005’s Tsotsi, which traces a week in the life of a young Johannesburg
street thug who wrestles with his conscience after finding a baby in the back
seat of a car he steals. The grim drama won that year’s Academy Award for Best
Foreign Film, and Hood — a USC film school grad — went on to an eclectic career
as a director, writer and actor.
Ender’s Game also focuses
strongly on the warring conscience of a boy, while contemplating several
big-ticket philosophical issues that include state-sanctioned child abuse,
planetary resource depletion and the novel’s most controversial theme: the
notion of meeting a bully’s brutality with a savage response designed to
prevent ALL subsequent attacks.
The setting is a futuristic
Earth, decades after our planet just barely repelled an invasion by an
insectoid alien race dubbed the “Formics.” Expecting that these swarming
monstrosities have returned to their home world in order to mount an even
larger assault fleet, Earth’s united military force has pinned its hopes on a
multi-national “Battle School” designed to train our best and brightest
military tacticians:
Carefully selected children.
Young minds are much more agile
and adaptable; we know this in our own real world. It therefore stands to
reason that young minds weaned on a diet of strategy-laced computer games might
be nurtured into becoming the next Patton, Napoleon or Hannibal.
(Needless to say, this rather
disturbing notion — and the possibility that modern nations might be acting on
it — is a helluva lot more timely today, than it was back in 1977. Among his
many other talents, Card deserves credit for scary prescience.)
We meet young Andrew “Ender”
Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) during his early days at Battle School, where he has
demonstrated a flair for besting older classmates in computer tablet battles.
This does not make Ender popular with some of his more thuggish peers, although
it does bring him to the attention of Col. Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford) and Maj.
Gwen Anderson (Viola Davis), always on the lookout for promising students.
Unfortunately, this focus makes
Ender even more of a target, leading to a confrontation with one of the school
bullies. Ender attempts to talk his way out of the beatdown; when that fails,
he surprises everybody by lashing out viciously enough to hospitalize his
older, taller tormentor.
Naturally, that makes Ender even
more interesting to Graff.
But the aftermath, recognizing
what he has done, troubles Ender deeply. Allowed a brief visit home, believing
he has been washed out of the program, Ender takes solace from his older
sister, Valentine (Abigail Breslin), who knows full well what he’s going
through, having once been a Battle School student herself. (Valentine’s saga is
covered elsewhere in Card’s canon.)
In great contrast, Ender’s
sociopathic older brother Peter (Jimmy Pinchak) delights in this apparent
failure; indeed, Peter comes close to killing Ender ... which reveals precisely
how the younger boy has learned to deal with bullies. Peter, as well, once was
a Battle School student; he was expelled because of his uncontrolled violent
rages.
Ender’s visible, guilt-ridden
remorse has been the final test; it demonstrates the boy’s ability to empathize
with an opponent, thus better understanding him. Graff swoops him back into the
program, where Ender joins other children in a spaceflight to a huge orbiting
military station designed primarily around its huge, zero-gravity “battle
room.”
The children are divided into
squadrons, with opposing teams meeting in the obstacle-laden battle room for a
futuristic blend of paintball and quidditch. The hand-held “weapons” are
paralyzers that temporarily freeze an opponent’s limb or torso; points are
given for various anatomical hits, but a team wins immediately if able to
maneuver one player through the enemy’s “goal.”
Ender quickly excels at this
game, displaying a facility for unorthodox strategies that cleverly — but
ruthlessly — sacrifice other squad members in order to achieve that ultimate
victory. This earns him the growing respect of new friends Bean (Aramis Knight)
and Alai (Suraj Partha), while isolating him further from jealous tyrants such
as Bonzo (Moises Arias), leader of the Salamander squad.
Ender’s effort to stand up to the
cruel Bonzo has an upside: the growing respect of Petra (Hailee Steinfeld),
also a member of the Salamanders.
The battle room games continue,
while — behind the scenes, unknown to the students — Graff nervously eyes a
deep-space monitor that counts down the anticipated return of the Formic
invaders.
Butterfield is perfect in the
title role, his sallow complexion, sunken eyes and haunted gaze every inch the
angst-ridden lad that Card created on the page. The young actor made a
startlingly mature debut in 2008’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and more
recently touched our hearts as the title character in 2011’s Hugo. Butterfield is a richly expressive performer, and here he displays just the
right blend of stubborn, defiant superiority and aching despair.
Ford delivers an equally
intriguing performance, on the one hand making Graff a gruff, seasoned
proponent of the “tough love” school: the sort of cheerfully grumpy bearing
we’ve come to expect from the veteran actor. But Graff also has another side
that isn’t nearly as attractive, and Ford is equally persuasive when this
hardened commander reveals his increasingly desperate allegiance to the belief
that the end justifies any means ... even those that irreparably damage his
prize pupils.
Too much is at stake to behave
otherwise.
Davis is the yin to Graff’s yang;
Anderson is a much more compassionate psychologist who worries deeply about
what is being done to these impressionable young minds. She’s also greatly
concerned about the degree to which Ender’s downtime activity — a solo,
puzzle-laden computer challenge — has been “invaded” by images of his sister
and Formic opponents. Davis’ increasingly defiant objections to Graff’s
methods, however, become a bit too shrill: not the best showcase for an actress
better known for the graceful subtlety of her performances.
Steinfeld, still coasting on her
Oscar-nominated work in the 2010 remake of True Grit, is plucky and
sympathetic as Petra, Ender’s staunchest ally. That said, her performance shows
little depth; she doesn’t dig deep into her role, the way Butterfield so
thoroughly inhabits Ender.
In fairness, Hood’s script more
correctly deserves the blame for this. In the filmmaker’s desire to focus on
the bond between Ender and Valentine — thus granting Breslin a better showcase
for her acting chops — he short-shrifts Petra, Bean and Alai, all of whom play
a much larger, and more emotionally crucial, role in Card’s novel.
It’s not necessarily a bad
artistic choice on Hood’s part; he obviously struggled to compress the massive
tapestry of Card’s novel into a 114-minute film. But those who vividly remember
the book's handling of Petra, Bean and Alai are apt to be somewhat disappointed
here.
A heavily tattooed Ben Kingsley
is striking as the half-Maori instructor who takes over when Ender graduates to
Command School, and Nonso Anozie makes a strong impression in his brief role as
a boot camp-style sergeant. Arias, as well, ensures that we’ll not soon forget
the petulantly vicious Bonzo: quite a switch from the goofy free spirit this
young actor played earlier this year, in The Kings of Summer.
Characters and performances
aside, however, every fan of this novel will want to know how well the battle
room skirmishes have been visualized. The news is good: Visual effects
supervisor and his company, Digital Domain, have done a slick job. The
zero-gravity environment is cleverly, persuasively constructed, and several of
Ender’s best campaigns — most notably his squad’s odds-against battle with two
opposing teams — leap faithfully off the page.
On the other hand, some quieter
scenes — such as Harrison Ford’s zero-g “swim” within a spaceship cabin —
suffer slightly when compared to the far superior (and very recent) work in Gravity.
Hood builds his film to an exciting,
breathtaking finale, although an epilogue of sorts — also faithful to Card’s
novel — gets too philosophically preachy for my taste, and even works against
what we’ve seen to this point. Card could better establish the groundwork for
this unexpected twist; Hood's film, of necessity short-changing such back-story,
sends viewers out on a note that is intended to be upbeat, but instead feels
dour and anticlimactic (while clearly setting up a potential sequel).
Still, the ride is crisp,
energetic and well played up to that point. Ender’s Game also raises
intriguing questions, as is intended; this is thoughtful sci-fi, designed to
encourage debate while entertaining. It succeeds on both counts.
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