Relive bitter arguments about whether to boycott the Ender's Game movie with this timeline of Orson Scott Card's misdeeds

After 25-plus years in development hell, the film version of author Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game finally opened last weekend to decent (but not fantastic) reviews and solid (but not spectacular) numbers.  Whether the opening was affected by the furor over Card's well-publicized remarks disparaging homosexuals is not known, but the controversy often threatened to overshadow talk of the movie itself.  Now, Vulture has assembled a handy guide to the sci-fi author's various foot-in-mouth statements and attendant backpedalings, allowing you to relive the debate over whether Card's personal beliefs should affect whether people see the movie over and over to your heart's content.

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.

Long-Ended Musical Fued Ended Again

Yoko One broke up The Beatles.  A lot of people say that, but of course it isn't true.  By the time Ono started dating John Lennon in 1966, the famous foursome were already losing interest in their partnership, wanted to explore different musical directions, and were quarreling over their management.  Still, Ono often gets the blame, because she was there.  Whatever lingering resentment that may have existed between Ono and former member Paul McCartney at the time of the breakup has long since dissipated- McCartney has said previously that she did not break up the band and the two of them shared the stage when Lennon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.  Still, it was confirmed earlier this week that the long-dead feud between the two musicians has finally, ultimately, and forever been put to rest.  It's unclear why this already-settled matter is being reported as being settled again, but it's nice to know.

Incidentally, McCartney has a new album out, 'New'.

Captain Phillips

Whether they’re plundering peaceful fishing villages in search of buried doubloons or attacking shipping vessels off the coast of Somalia, it is generally agreed upon that pirates are bad guys.  What they do is illegal and immoral and dangerous.  Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, based off a true story of an actual pirate hijacking in 2009, does not dispute this.  But the pirates aren’t cast as snarling villains, either.  Captain Phillips is, first and foremost, an effective action movie, but it’s also a political commentary where the pirates aren’t always unsympathetic and the U.S government is just a little bit scary.

Richard Phillips is a middle-aged commercial sea captain.  He has a wife and a couple of growing children.  He is taciturn, steadfast, dependable and sort of destined to be played by Tom Hanks.  Hanks has always had a likable everyman quality to him, and as Phillips he projects a kind of grounded world-weariness that makes us root for him.  In early scenes we see him make the rounds of his ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, checking for wear and tear, making sure everything is ready for the voyage round the horn of Africa to Mombasa.  The ship is carrying food.  For Captain Phillips, this trip is just another job, and director Paul Greengrass’ focus on the mundanity of it effectively sets up the chaos to come.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, we’re introduced to Abduwali Muse, a wiry young man who volunteers to lead the hijacking of Phillips’ ship.  This is just a job for Muse as well.  After the pirates board the Alabama, Muse turns to Phillips, gun in hand, and says, almost apologetically, that this is “just business.”

Screenwriter Billy Ray draws parallels like this between Phillips and Muse early and often.  On one level, attempts to compare the two are strained, even in bad taste.   Phillips is the one shipping food to give to starving people in Monbasa, Muse the one hijacking his ship and demanding upwards of $30 million in ransom.  Muse and his crew are in the wrong, but the movie gives us little moments where we can empathize with them.  Upon learning that they’ve boarded an American ship, their faces light up like kids at Christmas.  This is a good haul, one that could keep their families fed for a long while.  They chomp a local root to keep their energy up, and you can’t watch them for long without thinking about how very, very young they all are.

But what endears them to us the most is how absolutely screwed they are.  Since the movie is based on a true story, few in the audience doubt that Captain Phillips himself will live, but we don’t know about the pirates.  As news of the hijacking spreads to the United States Navy, it quickly becomes clear that they are not going to be okay.  Greengrass depicts the military as cold, faceless, and merciless.  The Marine snipers crouching under the railings of an American battleship are drenched in shadow, the hulking, armed officers that surround Muse after he is lured onto their boat terrifying in their uniformity.   Muse’s storming of the Maersk Alabama is frightening for the crew, but the movie is more than a little wary of the U.S. government as well.

Hanks’ Captain Phillips is in the middle, a decent man who is unjustly kidnapped but still regrets what must happen to his kidnappers.  In the end, he doesn’t know how to react.  Neither does the movie, not completely, perhaps because there is no right way to react to impossible situations like this one.

Gravity

Stars.

Gravity, the movie, not the partially-understood fundamental interaction of nature, is primarily a visual exercise. And it’s a successful one. The movie is glorious to look at, full of weightless tracking shots dancing through space, eerily quiet moments of astronauts floating in zero-G, and breathless sequences where our puny human stars are thrown against floating debris, battered space stations, and the void. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Apollo 13, movies have used the unique properties of outer space to impress audiences, but Gravity doesn’t coast on the accomplishments of its predecessors. In one sequence, first-time astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) makes it safely aboard a space station. She peels off her spacesuit piece by piece and curls into a fetal position, hanging in the air, twirling slowly round for a long, silent minute. It’s a lovely moment that works because Gravity is still impressed with the visuals of weightlessness, and we're free to join it.

When the movie isn’t pausing to regard the beauty of bodies in space, it’s a small-scale survivor thriller, a disaster movie for two. Bollock’s Dr. Stone has been sent to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, supervised by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). Ground control warms them that rubble from a defunct Russian satellite is hurtling their way, and soon the Hubble is busted to bits and the two astronauts are drifting through space, joined by a tether and making use of Kowalski’s rocket pack to travel to the International Space Station. Director Alfonso Cuarón comes up with wonderfully inventive ways to highlight their vulnerability by, say, attaching a camera to the front of Bollock’s suit to watch the horizon rise and fall over and over behind her as she spins, helpless, through space, or framing the characters against the softly glowing earth however many hundreds of miles below.

Gravity tries, on occasion, to be more than a showcase for visual creativity, but always comes up short. In the lead roles, Bullock and Clooney are fine, but the script doesn’t really demand they be anything more. You have to wonder why the producers would bother getting two big stars to play these roles in the first place, since their faces are often obscured by space helmets and their performances play second fiddle to the special effects. As the two drift toward the space station, they talk about the Bullock character’s life on the ground. She’s trying to forget about a traumatizing event back home, and the script takes a stab at exploring the theme of how to let go of one’s past. It never makes an impression, though. How could it, when it has to compete with an elemental battle for survival set against shots of the sun rising over planet Earth?

Gravity, then, doesn’t have the ambition of something like 2001, a movie that dealt with ideas as bold as its visuals. But that shouldn’t diminish how impressive these visuals are. These are boundary-pushing special effects at a time when it’s easy to assume that special effects have no more boundaries to push. It’s an argument for keeping movies on the big screen when the temptation is to watch everything at home at your computer. See it on the biggest screen you can and be wowed.

Clue Revisited

 

I was in middle school when I first saw Clue.  I loved it almost immediately.  Daffy, dynamic, and feverishly quotable, it filled a need to belong to a movie's cult that I didn't even know I had.  Apparently I wasn't the only one who felt that way, as Adam B. Vary of Buzzfeed has written an exhaustively researched, utterly delightful article about the movie, detailing how it went from a producer's pipe dream to box office flop to underground success.  It's a fun read, and an interesting indication of Buzzfeed's commitment to providing longer-form pieces.

Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (1968)

Isn't it ironic?

    What immediately stands out about Planet of the Apes, at least when watched from the perspective of jaded millennial movie-goer, is how earnest it is.  This, after all, is the yesteryear equivalent of a modern Hollywood blockbuster- 1968’s answer to The Dark Knight Rises or The Hunger Games, something designed to put asses in seats and keep them there with garish displays of pop opulence.  And yet no modern blockbuster has the courage, or the folly, to be this straight-forward about its message.

    In fact, no modern blockbuster would even go near this kind of message- Planet of the Apes is a sci-fi action movie built to tell us that humans are corrupt, war-mongering beasts doomed to destroy their own planet.  Pretty heavy for a movie that stars people dressed in monkey costumes that look only a few steps more realistic than something you’d see on The Muppet Show.  Camp and solemnity march hand-in-hand here.  That could give anyone who wants it plentiful excuse to mock the movie as outdated, but it’s also an interesting look into a time when audiences weren’t so ready to reject any message they didn’t have to drill through several layers of irony to unearth.

    The plot of Planet of the Apes is pretty well-known. Charleston Heston stars as a grizzly-faced astronaut who crash-lands on a distant planet where intelligent apes rule all and humans gape at each other and forage for crops like so many loin-cloth clad locusts.  Heston is taken prisoner, and all of ape society is aghast at this talking, properly walking freak of nature.  Adorable reversals of popular phrases follow.  “Man see, man do,” one ape says.  The Scopes Monkey Trial is reenacted with apes in the roles of both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the latter arguing that apes could not have evolved from humans since the ape scriptures clearly state otherwise.

    Today, all of this stuff would be incredibly tongue-in-cheek, and according to reviews written at the time, they may have been true even then.  But whatever its original audience thought, the movie at least has the confidence to play everything with a straight face.  That leaves it open to ridicule- it’s very hard not to roll one’s eyes and crack wise when some guy in a Halloween costume flaps his lips vaguely in time with his line and says “To apes, all men look alike,” and yet, by wearing its heart so obviously on its sleeve, the movie can land on images of surprising power.  The famous last shot, where Heston comes across a ruined Statue of Liberty poking out of a beach and realizes that humans are responsible for the sorry state of the world, is stark and haunting and effective.

    It’s been said we’re living in an Age of Irony.  People today simply know too much- about their friends, about their society, about other people’s society- to be surprised or delighted by much of anything.  In a world where we can safely assume that everything will eventually go downhill, treating things ironically is the only way we can squeeze enjoyment out of them.  Planet of the Apes comes from a different time, one where people actually enjoyed things for their own sake and believed that warnings against letting humanity’s darker impulses take it over might actually be useful.  And yet there are those who argue that the Age of Irony is over and that most people are ready to embrace simple things like family and country and to enjoy them sincerely.  Whether Planet of the Apes plays like an artifact from a time long gone or a rousing action-adventure with a pertinent warning about our future as a species may depend on which camp you fall into.

    Except for the monkey make-up, which is goofy no matter how you look at it.