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Ender’s Game Film Review
There’s a lot to love and little to hate in Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I’ll keep this short because there’s not much to say except that this is an entertaining and worthwhile movie. Most people on WWEnd have read the novel, if our new list is any indication, so a rehash of the plot is probably unnecessary. It’s a classic for a reason, and far more memorable than its many sequels.
Hood’s most recent directorial work was 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This may not inspire much hope, but even apart from his recent disclaimers about the X-Men film, Hood proves himself many times over with Ender’s Game, for which he also wrote the screenplay. The film retains most of the novel’s central plot while dropping most of the earthbound intrigue of international politics exacerbated by Ender’s siblings. In fact, his brother Peter only appears once, and briefly, enough to ensure that the audience understands that he represents Ender’s dark side and capacity for cruelty.
Asa Butterfield (Hugo) is great as Ender, managing a strong screen presence despite sharing it with Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley. His sister Valentine is played by Abigail Breslin (Zombieland, Little Miss Sunshine), and she gets plenty of screen time as the ideal person Ender wishes he could be. Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) makes a great Petra, and one wishes she could have had more time on screen. The other child actors are also surprisingly good, considering how many of them there are.
The special effects often went beyond serviceable to hauntingly beautiful. What we saw in the trailer wasn’t much beyond the final simulations, which necessarily have an artificial feel to them. The battle room was especially well-conceived, in a way that makes far more sense than I was ever able to imagine while reading the novel. It’s a great thrill to see the battle room games realized so well on screen. The mind game sequences necessarily feel like a video game, but they are inventively stylized and would probably actually make for a great game.
The only part of the film that didn’t quite work for me was the ending, which was slightly rushed and which collapsed a few plot elements. I’m unsure if this is a real problem with the pacing of the film, or if I’m just insisting on having things the way the novel told them, but it didn’t feel entirely right to me. In any case, all of the major themes remain intact throughout.
Ender’s Game is still a timely story about the cruelties of war that often flow from our insistence on war’s necessity–the cruelties towards our enemies as well as the cruelties visited upon our own.
Ender’s Game – First Trailer
Them’s some nice-looking special effects. Ender’s Game (also: Amazon, Kindle, Audible) is one of our most popular novels. Let’s hope the film tries to live up to it.
Ender’s Game Movie Poster!
This Ender’s Game poster looks pretty sweet if you ask me. I hope this means we’ll start to see more details and behind the scenes stuff coming out. They’ve been pretty stingy so far on their blog. What do you think?
