Ender's Game

            When it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, children have had it pretty rough of late.  Earlier this year, young Jaden Smith had to avoid death by monsters on a post-apocalyptic planet in After Earth.  In a few weeks, Katniss Everdeen and her teenage companions will be pit to the death against each other in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  And here, pubescent Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) must survive a brutal military boot camp designed to crush the innocence out of him so he can become a leader capable of saving the world from a race of bug-eyed extra-terrestrials.  For a tent-pole action movie, Ender’s Game is restrained, briskly paced, and tightly written, but its solemnity keeps it from becoming fun or exhilarating.

            Ender’s Game begins on planet Earth, where young Ender attends a government-run academy meant to train Earth’s next generation of military talent.  Some fifty years ago, Earth narrowly avoided being conquered by an alien race known as the Formics, and its leaders have spent the time since strengthening their defenses.  Writer-director Gavin Hood drops hints about the tight controls imposed on Earth’s citizens by their government- there’s a cap on procreation, for example- but the particulars are largely skipped over so the movie can focus on Ender’s progression from boarding school brat to military leader.

            Ender rises quickly through the ranks at his school both because he’s adept at interpersonal politics, showing a knack for saying the right things at the right time in front of the right people, and because the adults in his life see something in him.  Colonel Graff, played effectively by a scowling Harrison Ford, is in charge of recruiting at the school.  He and some of the other teachers watch Ender on video monitors and talk about how he’s a genius, a natural leader, the only one capable of defeating the alien threat.  Ender is basically a another version of Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, a pre-ordained messiah destined to save the world.  But unlike in those stories, there’s no sense that it’s at all enjoyable being Ender Wiggin, nothing to leaven the crushing responsibility of being the Chosen One.  Life at the academy is regimented and competitive.  There’s little room for joy, and Graff works overtime to make sure Ender gets less than even his fair share.  He tries to drive a wedge between Ender and the other students, the better to mold Ender into leadership material.  Some of Ender’s classmates become envious, even violent.  The adults leave Ender to deal with his enemies as they come, satisfied with his nascent brutality even as Ender is disturbed by it.  The largely unseen Formics may threaten humanity with extinction, but the movie sees these adults as the real villains.

            In the movie’s twist ending, those adults push Ender to do something unconscionable, and the final minutes raise interesting questions about the corrosive power of authority and the ambiguity of personal responsibility.  From some angles, Ender’s Game can be seen as adolescent wish fulfilment, with young viewers projecting themselves onto the stoic Ender, an incredibly gifted young man whose talents are manipulated and misused by authority figures.  That’s something of a disturbing way to hook viewers in for what is otherwise a special effects driven sci-fi spectacular, but those ideas give the movie a brooding, somber center that can’t be waved away.  Ender’s Game presents one point of view, a rather downbeat one, on what it’s like to be young.  It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for it to stand out among other movies doing the same thing.