Ender's Game

We saw Ender's Game at the weekend, were not much impressed. Neither of us had read the book by Orson Scott Card - I'd never heard of him, nor of his book. We try not to miss any sci-fi movie doing the rounds though. Rather than straight-ahead sci-fi, it's another in the slew of "young adult" speculative fiction currently enjoying popularity in book and film form. Half an hour in I had it labelled as "Harry Potter in Space". The book, published in 1985, itself adapted from an earlier 1977 short story, came well before Potter arrived on the scene, so perhaps I should say that Harry Potter was Ender Wiggin in Fantasy Land.

There are "messages" and "themes" in the movie (bullying, violence, and how it influences children, empathy, ruthlessness, isolation, manipulation) threaded through a tale of war with a desperate hostile insect-like race with whom humans were incapable of communicating or understanding. After devastating attacks by the alien species, narrowly defeated thanks to a particularly skilled commander, fifty years have passed with no further attacks. However, the world has united under a militaristic power who are preparing plans to prevent any future invasion. Groups of super-skilled children are being cultivated (specially bred?) in the hope of finding a new commander. This film's focus is on the training of an especially gifted child to be that commander.

War, in Ender's Game, is unlike any war we've seen in movies so far - it's total drone war on a massive scale.

Details in the novel missing from the movie, due to time constraints, meant that seeing the film "cold" with no previous information left some odd gaps and incongruities. A lot of time is spent watching Ender play video games; that soon had us both yawning. It seemed like time squandered, when more detail from the book could have been included.

I won't give away the juice of the plot, there are pages and pages of reviews and discussion on the net already. Just a word about performances. The young actors acquitted themselves well enough, I guess. Asa Butterfield carried the movie's weight manfully, but at times was too inscrutable (and inexperienced?) to convey all the stuff I believe the novel had included. The senior crew: Harrison Ford, Sir Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis all seemed rather wooden to me, cardboard cut-outs - oddly so in fact. Why Ben Kingsley, with fully tattooed face, and news that he was descended from Maori warriors, sported a weird South African accent I've yet to discover.

All in all I found Ender's Game to be rather peculiar, a bit like a phone call when the sound is breaking up, catching the odd word and inflection here and there but never quite getting the intended message.

Something worth mentioning here is the threatened boycott of the movie by various gay groups, due to the book's author's homophobic rants and views on gay marriage. I didn't see any sign of homophobia in the story as presented, nor in any reports of the novel's content, or the sequels which followed. I sympathise with views of gays on this, but also have to realise that many, many great authors, painters, singers, musicians, composers have, in their time, espoused views which are very different from my own. It can be hard to do, but unless we try to differentiate the person from their work, whatever it be, we shall miss a lot that is worthwhile. In a strange way, too, kind of in reverse, this reminds me of the questions raised by comments in the weekend's post regarding Russell Brand - his on stage persona compared to his political views.