Thursday, November 7, 2013

Movie Review: "Ender's Game" (Gavin Hood, 2013)

WAR PLAY: GAVIN HOOD ADAPTS "ENDER'S GAME"
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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