I read the
book - Orson Scott Card’s Nebula and Hugo Award winning novel - back in 85.
I’ve read a lot of science fiction, before and since, and I still put Enders
Game near the top of the best list. Card’s concepts back then were fresh and
engrossing… and disturbing – children bred, filtered, and trained to lead the
human race in a war against an alien force, waged through what is effectively
an elaborate video game. But it has taken so long for Ender to reach the big
screen that many of its key points may now seem old hat. Some of Card’s themes,
such as push-button, virtual war, are now real life. Others, like the story’s prepubescent
battle school, have been duplicated in more recent pop literature like the
Hunger Game series. But Ender’s story still carries weight and although the
film does not have enough time to do more than touch the surface of some of Card’s
more complex statements, it’s still worth experiencing.
Ender’s world is a future earth that has narrowly survived an invasion by
bug-like aliens and is now in a state of heightened paranoia over, what is
assumed to be, an inevitable second attack. The planet’s youth - intuitive, malleable, and unbiased by
long-evolved and tried strategies - have been found to be the best suited to
plan or improvise unanticipated battle strategies and lead the world’s forces
in a preemptive first-strike against the bug nation. Ender Wiggin (Asa
Butterfied) is a “third”. Although the film does not spend much time on this
concept, one can intuit that earth’s families are generally limited to two
children and that Ender’s allowed birth had much to do with a bloodline that
promises a potential battle leader. His siblings have both been in and out of
the same battle-training program that Ender is now starting as a pre-teen. His sister washed out
because she was too companionate, his brother was on the other side… booted
because he displayed overly violent tendencies. Ender seems to have both pieces
in his make up and he battles throughout his training and ascension to command to
understand and balance both. He confesses this core paradox of his story to his
sister while contemplating his role in this ultimate battle -
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy,
understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love
him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want,
what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in
that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
Butterfield (Hugo) is well cast as Ender – slowly convincing the
audience, as his character does his peers, that he is something special… a
standout. Harrison Ford, as Colonel Hyrum Graff, the head of the selection and
training program, seems out of place early in the film but revs up nicely as
the Colonel becomes obsessed over the possibility that Ender might be “the
one”. Ben Kingsley is also good as
Ender’s mentor but Nonso Anozie’s doughy battle-school Drill Sergeant Dap
strikes fear into no one.
Enders Game is a handsome film, shining in the battle-room training skirmishes
and the final remote control engagement. The film is a generally faithful,
although limited, presentation of Card’s outstanding novel and nicely balances
the glint of its sci-fi environment with the core questions of the cost of
victory and if it really matters how we win. 7 out of 10
