It’s tough for me to write about Ender’s Game, since it holds such a strong place in my heart. As a kid, it was the first book that I really remembered and eagerly encouraged friends to read. After 28 years of fan demands to get this movie made, the day is finally here. Ender’s Game isn’t transformative moviemaking, but it is a strong sci-fi film with decent ideas that maintains the spirit of the book. The book’s writer (Orson Scott Card) approves; he even helped write the screenplay.
Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is one of the star pupils being trained to defend Earth against the Formics (ant-like aliens). Ender is identified early by Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) and Major Henderson (Viola Davis) as the perfect student to become the leader of the battle against the aliens. To test Ender, the military leaders put him through a series of mental and physical tests involving other students from school. Ender learns how to become a leader in the process and makes friends (Hailee Steinfeld, Aramis Knight) and enemies (Moises Arias) alike. Once he graduates that program, Ender gets moved to the forward command where he meets the previous hero of the Formic Wars, Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), to discuss battle tactics and prepare for the war with the aliens.
Ender’s Game cannot end on a cliffhanger; too many years of frustrating development and rabid fans would not allow it. As such, Ender’s Game ends where the book does, but it is forced to take shortcuts. Ender’s Game’s biggest failing is truncation; if the movie was split into two halves (battle school vs. forward command training), the characters would get more time to be fleshed out. As is, character development for anyone outside of Ender and Colonel Graff is simplistic at best and nonexistent at its weakest. In addition, the plot is forced to make a series of mini leaps to keep the story moving, instead of really letting us into the mind of Ender which the book does so well. The weakness does not derail the movie, but it will cause you to groan from time to time.
However, the special effects and battles will not. These special effects are first-rate; the space stations are well designed, and the battle chambers are beautifully adapted and realized. The wrinkle of the battles in Ender’s Game is they are executed at a distance from the main action, like a video game. The special effects team embraces the concept, treating the training sequences as immersive physical and mental exercises that feel like missions in the Legend of Zelda or Grand Theft Auto. Each little mission also adds substance to Ender’s thought process, showing how smart he is to fill some narrative gaps. The video gaming also gets brought up nicely in the screenplay by showing how virtual reality decisions can be much different from real decisions.
Acting is mostly workmanlike in Ender’s Game. Asa Butterfield acquits himself admirably playing someone people have been dying to see. Butterfield looks the part, and really sells the third act weariness when he learns the consequences of some of his tactics. Harrison Ford is pretty good playing world-weary Colonel Graff. However, Viola Davis, Ben Kingsley, Hailee Steinfeld, and Abagail Breslin don’t get enough time to add much of anything to their characters.
Sure Ender’s Game wasn’t the greatest movie of all time, but it was neither a catastrophic failure. Gavin Hood’s film raises solid sci-fi questions and uses great special effects to tell its story reasonably well. If I had to choose, I’d say the book is better, but the movie is really fun to watch on the big screen, except when you have to watch puking in space, yuck.