Ender’s Game

2013

PG-13

Produced by: John Textor, Lynn Hendee, Robert Chartoff, Linda McDonough, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Orson Scott Card, Gigi Pritzker

Directed by: Gavin Hood

Written by: Gavin Hood, Orson Scott Card

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld

Summit Entertainment

1.93/5 Stars

Consensus: One of the most appalling and forgettable famous-teen-book-to-film adaptations, Ender’s Game manages to ignore everything that was good about the book, and focus entirely on CGI you could get from staying home and playing a video game.

Plot: Ender Wiggins (Asa Butterfield) is a recruit for the military in the distant future. After being attacked by aliens the army recruits children whose creativity and ability to perceive strategy differently may give them an edge.

Directing: When you can manage to make Harrison Ford (Colonel Graff) seem bored and awkward, in an attempt to portray a stern and opinionated character, you know you’re doing it wrong, even if Ford is past his prime (and he is past his prime), every actor involved in this film should be seriously pissed with Gavin Hood. How one managed to mess up such an all-star cast so amazingly well is beyond comprehension. From awkwardly presented relationships, (i.e. that of Ender [Asa Butterfield] to his family) to a poor explanation of the world of Ender’s Game, its no wonder we’ve never heard of Hood before. The entire film seems to be totally whitewashed and confused, especially considering the brilliance of the source material it was drawing off of. *

Acting: You would have high expectations and hopes from such an all-star cast, even Asa Butterfield gave a great performance in Hugo (2011) and the talents of veterans Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley (Mazer Rackham) are added to boot, but not even they could save the miserable script and bad directing from itself. Harrison Ford seems to slowly realize what a bad movie he is in and by the end of the film looks as embarrassed as we feel watching him. He and Kingsley almost seem to just feed off each other’s anger at being brought to such a lowly place, don’t mistake this as acting, its just genuine professional anger. In fact several scenes could have just been rage against Hood, who was later edited out and replaced by Butterfield or one of the other unfortunate actors to have been hired for this film. Wooden, campy, unrealistic, and forced acting riddled the film.*

Editing: The editing was fine, they didn’t totally mess it up at least, like every other aspect of this miserable film. The shots all make sense and flow together well. The bored actors look bored in a consistent and logical manner. Again, nothing very cool or innovative or noticeable at all is presented, it very much follows the “safe” route of editing and provides nothing interesting at all, so that’s consistent. ***

Art Direction: The sci-fi landscape was really well imagined at times, and then there were shots of Ender in his house and it almost seemed like they said “eh, whatever, just put him in one of the extra sets for a Disney Channel pre-teen sitcom, it doesn’t need to look all sci-fi and post-alien invasion, people can use their imaginations! We just spent all our money on CGI! Because that’s what people go to movies for!” Yeah, it was like that. **

Cinematography: Imagine if your grandpa took a photography class, and managed to actually do really well, and then he went to Apple and took a bunch of pictures of fancy sci-fi looking stuff that he didn’t really care about or understand, just for credit for the class. Now imagine your weird uncle who is 40 and still lives with grandpa thought it would be really neat to photo-shop a bunch of cool looking sci-fi stuff he learned about in his community college graphic design class. You’d be stoked that it wasn’t the most awful thing you ever saw, but you wouldn’t really be excited about it either. It goes in your gee-whiz file, just like the forgettable cinematography in this film. **

Screenplay: A minefield of cringe worthy one-liners the screenplay impressively bleached out all the anti-xenophobic/pro-humanity themes and interesting or compelling character development that the book contained. This is probably the biggest travesty of an adapted screenplay that could be witnessed on the screen. Again, Ford and Kingsley look embarrassed at times to be saying the awful lines they are given, and you can’t help but feel bad for the kids involved in the film as well. 1/2

CGI/Special Effects: Possibly the only place the film was successful, the CGI was well generated. The video game Ender plays looks sleek and several space-battles are interesting as well. In fact the film seems to be driven by CGI rather than character or plot development. It looks great and has lots of explosions, gosh it must have been a good film after all! Silly me. ****