Film Review: Ender's Game

Ender's Game is not a film that I can review without giving away the ending. So above the jump I'm going to say that a) the plot hole at the end is a result of the adaptation massively compressing the final act, and b) the film gets a B-.

What Worked
Asa Butterfield can act. I really can't speak for the rest of the kids because the rest of the kids were never required to do anything, but Butterfield holds his own against Harrison Ford, which is pretty damn impressive. In my opinion, though, this makes the voiceover narration fairly redundant. The film did not feel two hours long, and I would not have minded if the film had obeyed the maxim of "show, don't tell," particularly during the sections where Ender and his team are supposed to be burning out.

The film is f*cking beautiful and the score is great (although I defy you to watch the sequence with Ender and Petra training in the Battle Room and not hear the Game of Thrones theme). The film manages to undercut itself here as well, though: We see the exact same battle sequence three different times. There's a reason for this re-use of stock footage, namely that it's an official recording of Mazer Rackham's big battle and they deliberately censored a huge chunk of it, but we don't really realize that's what's going on until the third time we see it.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT


The decision to turn the Battle Room game into Quidditch-in-Space was a smart one given Harry Potter's popularity. (In the book, passing through the gate isn't widely accepted as the "instant-win" condition, but rather the means by which the game doesn't become a stalemate; you need four people to open the door and one person to pass through it, otherwise you can't win.) It also helps simplify Ender's, um, final solution to that game. (In the books, Ender learns in his very first game that the "victory dance" is actually what matters, not wiping out the enemy army - he's not frozen when Salamander loses - and then sits on that knowledge until his final Battle Room game.)

Speaking of final solutions, this is an anti-war sci-fi film that nonetheless very wisely stays away from the trappings of Starship Troopers.  If you'll pardon the pun, director Gavin Hood would have given the game away by putting Harrison Ford in a pseudo-Nazi uniform. Furthermore, whereas it's fairly obvious in Starship Troopers that humanity was the real aggressor, here even Ender understands that the formics thought of Earth as nothing more than a potential colony world - they were the aggressive expansionists.  Still, it's impossible not to watch Ender's reaction to discovering how he's been played and come away with the impression that this is not an anti-war film, especially since - and I blame the script, not the actor for this - his reaction is more "history will remember me as a monster" than "you destroyed my childhood innocence by tricking me into committing xenocide."

Pragmatic Adaptation
In the books there's this huge subplot about Ender's older siblings Peter and Valantine taking over the world through the power of blogging (in a novel written in 1985). This webcomic pretty aptly shows the problem inherent in that subplot, and it's fine that it was dropped. (It only really becomes important in Shadow of the Hegemon, a book that doesn't feature Ender at all, but is rather about the various nations trying to use Ender's classmates to take over the world.)

And as for not explaining what the Mind Game really is, oh well. The fact that Graff has it deleted might cause a problem in the event of a sequel. (Long story short: the Mind Game is as much the formics' invention as the humans', their goal in communicating with Ender is not so much to come to an understanding with him as it is to neutralize him, and the program eventually evolves into a sentient A.I. named Jane that plays a rather significant role in Xenocide and Children of the Mind.)

Problems likely to only bug book fans
As someone who's read Ender's Shadow (basically a re-telling of Game from Bean's perspective), there were a lot of things that didn't really gel, but your average viewer is not going to care that there's one Battle Room instead of seven, or that the Little Doctor execution is completely different, or that the film implies Ender/Petra instead of Dink/Petra or Bean/Petra. These are understandable changes: the one Battle Room with its view of Earth is f*cking gorgeous, and with Bean reduced to a cipher, of course it's going to be Ender who gets the pseudo-love interest, who is then going to need something to do during the final battle rather than collapse.

"The enemy's gate is down" doesn't work in the film the way it did in the book because all the stuff about actually using that orientation as a strategy never comes up. (In the book, Ender comes up with the idea of kneeling, shooting your own legs to turn them into a shield, and then dropping legs-first towards the enemy position.)

The fact that they left the whole population control/"Third" thing in and then never did anything with it was a bit annoying. They could have spent more time pushing Ender to exhaustion and less time on a bit of worldbuilding that has no relevance to the film after about 30 minutes.

Fatal Flaws
Now on to the two parts of the adaptation I actually have serious problems with, and the reasons why I can't give the film a higher rating.

One: Ender kills two people in the book, prior to his "graduation game," as the film calls it. This fact is kept from him but not from the audience.  It helps with the "Ender is truly afraid of only himself" theme, which in turn makes the ending more powerful.  But beyond that, the fact that Stilson and Bonzo live in the film just helps whitewash our hero. (And yes, Bonzo lives; Graff isn't just lying to Ender. Listen to Ender's dialogue during his boat scene with Valentine.) Are they trying to make the ending all that much more of a gut-punch? Because they didn't. Read on...

Two: the ending is massively simplified. Instead of going to Eros, the formics' forward base during their invasion of Earth, Ender goes across the galaxy to some bugger world. This is bad enough, but then he's deliberately told that he'll be leading an invasion against the formic forces.  (It's been a while since I read the novel, but I recall him being told he was preparing for the Third Invasion, which he assumed meant the buggers were on the march again, only to be told at the end, nope, we are the Third Invasion.) This makes The Twist At The End much easier to see coming, which is a huge disappointment. Ender's Game the novel was hamstrung by the fact that, as a book, you can see how many pages are left, and when Ender's "graduation test" begins on page 290 of a 324-page book, you kind of know that something is up. Unless you bring a watch to the film, you're not going to know what percentage of the way through the film you are when you get to that scene, which had the potential to make The Twist At The End all the better.

There's a second problem with the simplified ending. I can just about accept that Ender is the only person who noticed the ruined castle within walking distance of the IF's forward military base. He's the one whose dreams have been haunted by it, after all. I cannot accept that there was a living formic queen within walking distance of one of if not the most important military installation in the galaxy and nobody knew about it. That's stupid. And then he somehow manages to take it off-world. You couldn't smuggle a formic queen's egg through airport security, let alone a military base. That's just, in the words of Doctor Evil, regoddamndiculous.