Hell's Frozen Over: The "Ender's Game" Movie

I read "Ender's Game" when I was in junior high, and several of the sequels, but I was never particularly taken with the series. The elements that many of its fans prize - the shockingly young age of the primary characters, the brutality of their actions, and the sadism of their elders, did not particularly appeal to me, and I didn't find them vital to the story. That's probably why I didn't react as badly to the film version of "Ender's Game" as many others, which has predictably had its content considerably toned down from the book.

In a not-too-distant future, mankind has barely survived an invasion force of insectoid aliens called the Formics, and have directed their entire society towards training a generation of young soldiers for the next encounter with them. Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), who runs the Battle School program for the most gifted children, singles out a boy named Andrew "Ender" Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) as their best hope, and aggressively begins to train and mold him into a ruthless leader. Ender is conflicted, and despite Graff's efforts to isolate him, tries to maintain ties with his older sister Valentine (Abigail Breslin). Ha also make friends and allies at Battle School, including a girl named Petra (Hailee Steinfeld) and a younger boy, Bean (Aramis Knight).

"Ender's Game" stays fairly faithful to the books, perhaps too much so, trying to cram far too much story into a film that one suspects was contractually required to run shorter than two hours. There is way too much exposition, introducing concepts and characters at breakneck speeds, and the pacing is a mess. Even with several important subplots deleted from the story, everything still feels rushed. The timeline has been seriously compressed, so that Ender's training only seems to take a few months instead of several years. Many characters don't get nearly as much fleshing out as they need to, and there are some parts of the story that are so watered down, that they don't really work any more. The primary one is the Mind Game, a video game used as a psychological testing tool that takes on greater for Ender. Rendered in unappealing CGI, all the Mind Game sequences are a bust.

Then you have the main feature of the Battle School, the Battle Room, a zero-G training environment where two "armies" of cadets meet in simulated combat. Despite so much importance and emphasis being placed on Ender's experiences in the Battle Room, which have by far the most impressive visuals of the film, we only get to see two training sessions and two full battles. After that, we're whisked away somewhere else completely. It's difficult to stay invested in the film when we keep bouncing around from place to place, from one set of characters and dilemmas to the next. Ender has many challenges to overcome, but they're overcome so quickly that most of them hardly feel like challenges at all.

Still, the movie gets some fundamental things right. The first is Ender, aged up to about twelve or thirteen. Asa Butterfield, last seen as the waif in "Hugo," is credible as a boy with the potential for enormous cruelty and destructiveness, but who also has great intelligence, empathy, and sensitivity. Many of Ender's experiences could have come across as dry philosophical exercises, but Butterfield succeeds in humanizing the young genius enough to make the audience care about him. Likewise Colonel Graff is about the best performance I've seen out of Harrison Ford in years. Some of his actions border on the inhumane, but you understand Graff's motivations and his reasoning.

I wish I could say the same for some of the others. Hailee Steinfeld and Abigail Breslin's roles have been so altered or truncated, they're not left with much to do. Ender and Petra's friendship gets some unfortunate romantic connotations the way they've been aged up. The role of Major Anderson, the second in command at Battle School, was beefed up for Viola Davis. She's placed as a counterpoint to Graff, concerned with Ender's psychological well-being and the damage that the training may be doing. Unfortunately, it's a thread of the story that goes nowhere, and abandoned before it can really pan out. Then there's Moises Arias, an interesting choice to play Ender's chief rival, Bonzo, but severely undercut for simple lack of time.

I got enough out of the movie that I would recommend it, but with a lot of caveats. It's compromised, it's messy, it has a lot of good ideas it doesn't know what to do with, it's too short, and it's too reductive. And yet, I admire it for its great ambitions and for pushing the envelope as far as it did. And I'm glad that we've reached a point, culturally, where an "Ender's Game" film of any faithfulness could be produced.
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