by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Left: Asa Butterfield plays the title role in Mr. Hood's film
As I walked out of the Cinemagic Theater after seeing “Ender’s Game,” a sci-fi extravaganza based on a novel by Orson Scott Card, I wondered—how would someone who had read the book feel about the film’s shattering conclusion? Would they still be emotionally overwhelmed by the story’s tragic turn of events? Or would they numbly endure it, sighing with familiarity? As a non-“Ender” reader, I couldn’t begin to guess. But I can say that the movie left me at once exhilarated, stunned, and mostly, just plain horrified. It’s that powerful.
Even in its early scenes, the film’s images are finished
with painfully potent menace. The story kicks
off in the future, where an army of children are being schooled to defend Earth
from a race of silent, bug-like aliens known as “the Formics.” But the only one of kids who’s truly up to
the task is Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), a pale, wide-eyed student who is
invited to join an elite battle school by his superior, Colonel Graff (Harrison
Ford). Graff makes the offer during a
visit to Ender’s home and then asks if he can speak to the boy alone—a request
that Ender’s father vehemently refuses.
But Graff isn’t worried. “You
can’t exactly stop me,” he declares roughly.
And so “Ender’s Game” takes us to a massive gray space
station where Ender and his classmates are trained in the art of intergalactic
warfare. It’s a place far removed from
the companionable battlefields of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars”—the kids may get
to wear sleek helmets while firing laser guns in zero gravity, but they’re
governed by Graff and company with a ruthlessness that turns them against one
another. Each kid has bought into the
dream of surpassing their colleagues by becoming the perfect soldier, as Ender
soon discovers when he incurs the wrath of a young officer named Bonzo (Moises
Arias). Being no stranger to
intimidation, Ender wards off Bonzo’s aggression via careful strategy; at
times, he even helps Bonzo improve his standing amongst his troops. But when Bonzo attacks Ender in the shower,
Ender responds with brutal force. After
burning his attacker with a jet of scalding water, Ender seizes him, roaring, “I
could break your arm!” In their ranks,
war has already begun.
A good portion of the movie is focused on this and other
examples of brutal bullying—the movie’s director, Gavin Hood (who also wrote
the screenplay), makes a point of showing us how rampant cruelty can consume
competitive and controlled kids. But it
turns out that Mr. Hood has something bigger in mind. The violent encounter with Bonzo scars Ender
mentally, but it turns out to be just a teaser, a smaller scale version of trials
yet to come. Graff has no intention of
letting his favorite soldier remain a student—he wants Ender to lead an
invasion of the Formics’ planet, an end-all strike “to prevent all future
attacks.” So, sooner than you’d hope,
our hero is whisked to the frontlines and closer toward the brink of war.
During these scenes, “Ender’s Game” appears to lose some
of its bite. The meat of the story is
the combative relationships between Ender and his fellow child soldiers, and
the way they suffer in what is basically a futuristic police state. But when Ender begins his final training to
fight off the Formics, he works with a perfectly functional team of charming
wisecrackers and a cute girl named Petra (Hailee Steinfeld). Which is fine until they’re forced to endure
relentless, computerized battle simulations that feel like brilliantly
programmed video games, but video games nonetheless. Unlike the rest of the film, there’s a
hollowness to these scenes, even though cinematographer Donald M. McAlpine captures
the action in an exhilaratingly dark whirl.
What, one has to wonder, can the movie offer at this point?
It’s difficult to answer that question without revealing
the conclusion of the story. But suffice
to say that in the end, “Ender’s Game” is revealed to be an anti-war film in
the most brutal and powerful sense—an action movie with a genuine declaration
of peace. Of course, ideology means
nothing without conviction, but that’s where Mr. Hood’s direction comes
in. Working with editor Zach Staenberg,
he gives the movie a raw, operatically sincere emotional quality mixed with
brutal darkness. You can see it early on
when Ender is comforted by his sister Valentine (Abigail Breslin), in a tender
moment that’s violently interrupted by their brother Peter, who coerces Ender
into wearing a sad-looking rubber alien mask and then proceeds to nearly crush
his neck. Here, as in Mr. Hood’s last
film (the underrated “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”), we get both sweet
vulnerability and monstrous cruelty, jammed frighteningly close together. The result is that “Ender’s Game” feels dangerously
and emotionally alive, allowing its cease-fire ideology to finally hit you like
a punch in the gut.
It is that same punch that allows Ender to comprehend the
film’s core belief—that violence and cruelty are never acceptable, even in
war. That may sound like an overly familiar
message, but it takes on a new meaning when placed in the context of a galactic
battle in which the possibility of the species wide extermination of both the
humans and the Formics looms horribly. And
though the movie offers hope for peace, it also forces us to fully confront the
awful reality of such a mission being placed not only in the hands of a kid,
but in the hands of anyone.
Of course, Ender is not just anyone. Mr. Butterfield’s performance allows us to
see him as a tender, easily hurt boy whose viciousness is unleashed when he’s
prodded too forcefully. He’s certainly
far from innocent; Graff may manipulate Ender in ways a child could never
conceive, but Ender has a knack for manipulation too, especially when it comes
to tossing off winning platitudes to insure his teammates’ loyalty. “If anyone has a better idea than mine, I
want to hear it,” he tells the kids under his command, but does he really mean
it? Or is he simply trying to win their
loyalty with carefully constructed humility?
Either
way, the tactic repeatedly works and as the movie ramps up to its stellar
finish, Ender morphs into a tense, confident, even gloating warrior. As he directs a fleet of starships, spreading
his arms wide in grand, sweeping gestures, he’s like a conductor, drawing a
mighty crescendo from an orchestra of death and thankfully, Mr. Hood allows us
to enjoy the spectacle of this brilliant boy in action. He understands that even a dark blockbuster
like this one should be driven in part by the pleasures of adventure and the
combined sweep of both thrilling action and complex ideas.
And
yet Mr. Hood still manages to shows us the true price of being responsible for
lives lost in war. He opens the film
with a quote from Ender, in which the boy explains that to defeat his enemy, he
has to know them—but that once he knows them, he inevitably loves them. More than anything, this thought cuts clearly
to the heart of the movie and its belief that while war is indeed a drug, the
love Ender feels for his enemies is a far sweeter tonic. The young solider may not be the picture of
unshakable nobility, but he’s never more human than when he’s staring into deep
black, dying Formic eyes, finally understanding his own words and what it truly
means to care for someone who is on the proverbial “other side.”
Sadly,
Ender’s realization of this love’s importance comes late in the film, although
it could certainly develop if the series continues. But if “Ender’s Game” winds up being the last
of Ender’s cinematic adventures, it certainly leaves you with plenty to think
about. In the final scene, Ender rests confidently
on a spaceship, ready to atone for his mistakes. But as viewers, we are given an even greater
chance—a chance to not make those mistakes in the first place, to create a
future far happier and more loving than the one that gave birth to Ender
Wiggin.
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