Ender’s Game (2013) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and The Star Wars Trilogy.

Ender’s Game is a long-awaited adaptation of an award-winning novel from the 80s, which presents a common trope of that era: child saviors. However, this story is more complex and nuanced than the standard fare of 80s youth cinema, as it stands up to more realistic terms. Does it succeed? You will have to decide for yourself.

First Impressions

The trailer depicts an alien attack on Earth that nearly decimated the population. A voice over by Harrison Ford says that in order to succeed, they will need a new kind of soldier, children. Ender is a young boy recruited and trained to be the last of his kind–a special type of person that doesn’t think the way others do. He and other young people board a space vessel and take the fight to an alien world, where Ender orders the ship to fire, blowing up the planet. Is this part of Ender’s Game?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Fifty years prior to the start of the film, an alien species known as the Formics attacked Earth. It was only by the sacrifice of a pilot, Mazer Rackham, who flew into the Formics command vessel, that Earth was able to survive. Still, tens of millions of people died. Since that day, the International Fleet (a military organization spanning all the world’s countries) has worked to evaluate the smartest children on the planet as the best hope to lead an upcoming battle. Trained on video games, these young teenagers can be decisive and fearless, with quicker reflexes than adults. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is the choice proposed by Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford).

Ender is bullied in school. However, Graff believes him to be ready for the next step and has his neural implant removed, which makes Ender sad, believing he has washed out. When teenage bully Stilson (Caleb Thaggard) attacks him the next day, the smaller Ender knocks him down and repeatedly kicks him to make him stay down. Graff and Major Anderson (Viola Davis) are impressed with his tenacity, though Anderson worries that they need a leader and not another bully. Ender is advanced into an orbiting space station where he joins other “launchies” at Battle School. Here, they study combat techniques and train in a zero-gravity course called the Battle Room, which allows them to advance strategy and tactics.

Ender is singled out often by Graff as the most elite and best student, making him a target of many others. He is able to make a few friends from his initial group, including Bean (Aramis Knight) and Alai (Suraj Partha). One night, Ender discovers a “mind game” on his data pad. It’s a simulation designed by Anderson to test how he’s feeling. It creates no-win scenarios as it taps into his subconscious, showing him strange images of an alien and his sister, Valentine (Abigail Breslin). Ender is promoted to Salamander Group, led by Bonzo Madrid (Moises Arias), a cruel older boy who is at least a head shorter than Ender.

Ender befriends Petra (Hailee Steinfeld), the only female on Salamander Army, and trains with her against the wishes of Bonzo. During their next game, Bonzo orders Ender to sit out the round in the Battle Room since he doesn’t know their strategy. But when Ender sees the team losing, he jumps in regardless and, using a unique strategy, wins the game. Graff promotes Ender to lead a new team, Dragon Army, which is made up of other “misfits,” including Bean, Alai, and a former bully, Bernard (Conor Carroll). When Bonzo angrily confronts Ender in the shower the next day, the bully slips and hits his head hard. Ender quits the program, feeling guilty even though the other boy started the fight.

Back on Earth, Ender explains to Valentine that once he understands how his enemy thinks, he also loves them. She convinces him to return to the school to help save the planet. Graff instead takes Ender to the advanced Command Base on an old Formic staging planet. The human base is built inside the rocky spires of the alien planet. Ender is shocked when he finds a man (Ben Kingsley) with a Māori facial tattoo in his room. The man says he is Mazer Rackham, and he survived the battle 50 years ago by ejecting from his fighter. He will train Ender in the final simulations, commanding large battle fleets and drone ships.

Ender is reunited with his friends from Battle School, who have been training in his absence. Petra commands the “Little Doctor,” a Molecular Detachment Device (the MD-500), which shatters the bonds between molecules, destroying them. The group runs several simulations in rapid succession, resulting in mostly victories. But after a vicious defeat, Ender is tired and demoralized. Graff tells Rackham and other military leaders that he believes Ender has the empathy to win. The final simulation is against the Formic fleet outside their home planet. Ender devises a new plan in frustration, leaving all ships unprotected except the Little Doctor, which he gets close enough to the planet to fire. It destroys the Formic queens and ends the war decisively.

Graff congratulates him and then informs the boy that this was not a simulation. He was leading a real fleet against the real Formic homeworld. Shocked, Ender screams at the Colonel, who tells him simply that they won. Ender counters that it’s “the way we win matters.” That night, Ender dreams of the Mind Game, which makes him realize the structure outside his window on the base is the same as the one in the game. Entering the cave-like structure, he meets an insectoid-alien, a Formic, who is guarding the last Queen egg in existence. Seeing Ender cry, the alien realizes he is regretful about his destruction of the homeworld and doesn’t kill him. Ender promises to find a new home for the Formics to rebuild. He is promoted to an Admiral and left to travel in space by himself.

“Knocking him down was the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones too, so that he’d leave me alone.” – Ender Wiggin

History in the Making

Ender’s Game suffers from the same problem that most films adapted from popular books have. It is nearly impossible to capture the plot, characters, and nuances of a book in a film that runs less than two hours long. They will always fall short of pre-existing fans’ expectations, even if the movie is well-made. A film like Blade Runner is great despite not being anything like the book, while Dune or Starship Troopers may suffer from the differences in their adaptations. That said, it tries to pack as much as it can from the book by Orson Scott Card into its 113-minute runtime.

The book the film is based on was originally published in 1985 and became an instant sci-fi classic, winning both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 1985 and 1986, respectively. It has become a staple on the reading list for Officer training in the US Marine Corps. But it was denied licensing by Card for several decades, citing the difficulty in adapting the story and creative differences with studios. Card began writing scripts himself, finally getting some traction in 2009. By late 2010, writer/director Gavin Hood became attached to the project. This was the same guy who had previously directed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, considered by many to be the worst example of the Hugh Jackman superhero franchise. Still, the love for the source material made this an eagerly anticipated film.

Having never read the original novel, I cannot comment on the adaptation, only the finished film. It seems as if there’s a lot of information that is trying to be communicated in every frame of film, with characters saying lines that feel like paraphrasing prose, rather than actual dialogue from teenagers. There’s so much crammed into the film that anyone unfamiliar with the story may become immediately lost and need multiple viewings to understand some of the nuances of the plot. Much of the dialogue seems stilted, with the film occasionally having other characters finish a line started by someone else. This may be a way to show connectedness between the characters, but the flow of the scenes becomes weird using such a device. The young cast mostly does a good job, given what is required of them. However, Asa Butterfield feels very wooden in his performance. As the lead character in the film, his acting does not necessarily engage the audience to like him–which seems like a problem when the audience is supposed to be rooting for him.

Genre-fication

Military science-fiction films can end up being hit or miss. They can be well received by the audience, like Aliens and Starship Troopers, or they can fall short of the mark, as with Universal Soldier and Battle: Los Angeles. Ender’s Game falls somewhere in the middle. Technically, it’s engaging with the spaceships, dramatic battles, and tropes of the action war genre (specifically the tough drill sergeant or the hazing of new recruits). But having a film that puts children in the position of being leaders and soldiers in an intergalactic war seems distasteful and hard to get behind. Not that Hollywood has shied away from putting children and teens in these positions.

The 1980s featured many films about kids being involved in combat or coming in contact with military might. Who can forget WarGames, Iron Eagle, Red Dawn, or The Last Starfighter? However, none of these films seems to take themselves as seriously as Ender’s Game does. Knowing that it’s adapting a novel doesn’t change the tone to be less fun and more serious. One can argue, The Last Starfighter is a very similar film. A young teen trains on a video game to get recruited into a star force to stop an invading alien threat. Yet that film seems so much more lighthearted and innocent. It’s not about a young person committing genocide or being coerced into attacking an enemy that hasn’t shown any provocation. And they’re valid comparisons since the source of each is contemporary to the other by only one year, 1984 and 1985.

Societal Commentary

The best thing about Ender’s Game is that it is rife with social commentary. It suggests ideas on the qualities of leadership, sacrifice, and ethical conundrums of warfare. Though sometimes it’s clunky in its execution. Ender literally asks, “What makes a good leader?” when writing to his sister, reminding the audience that he is questioning an important idea of the story. There’s no definitive answer in the film, however, as all aspects of leadership are flawed. Graff and Anderson are the two adults in charge of the young, elite soldiers. Both represent one aspect of the emotional spectrum, with Graff representing aggression and Anderson representing compassion. They work together, but Graff is much more in charge and, in the end, is the one who gets his way. He leads by obfuscation. He withholds pertinent information from his command that would alter the decisions Ender makes, so he can “guide” him into making the choice that Graff wants made. Anderson attempts to asses how Ender feels, to which Graff snaps that he doesn’t care (in a great curmudgeonly way that only Harrison Ford could do it). To Graff, Ender and his team are further tools in a flawed plan for revenge against the Formics.

When Ender discovers the deception, that the simulation was false and he has committed genocide against the enemy, he snaps. Graff reminds him that the ends justify the means: “We won.” Ender reminds the Colonel that “The way we win matters,” which speaks to the empathy that Ender has acquired through studying his enemy. In his observations of the Formics, he has come to understand them and, in that way, love them. Isn’t this the true lesson? That listening to and understanding those who differ from us is the best way to solve issues? On the flip side of this argument is the question about “Why we fight.” War is not just a way to defend territory from aggressors. It’s a business, and often a veiled way to accumulate power. Ideological aspects aside, the information presented in the film shows an alien race attacking Earth (in a spectacular air battle that pays homage to Independence Day). Humans manage to push back the threat, but continue pushing. Even though in 50 years, the aliens have never re-engaged. The film suggests that the Formics’ world is overcrowded and they are looking for a suitable replacement. Perhaps the initial attack and escalation were a misunderstanding (as seems to be the case). Either way, the humans have become the aggressor, the villain, in this scenario. Graff justifies his actions on Ender’s own explanation of why he kept kicking the bully when he was down. Attacking to decimate is a way to ensure victory in the current battle, and all future battles. Isn’t this the same argument made in sci-fi films, like Minority Report, regarding future crimes? The future says they are going to commit a crime, so arresting them now prevents that. Yet, it’s not something that has actually happened yet.

The Science in The Fiction

As with other recent space invasion films, humanity is on the cusp of technology to lead fleets of battleships into space. Perhaps in this case, the Formic technology provides a key to solving that problem. The film suggests that there’s usage of hibernation techniques for long space voyages, but that it’s still relatively quick to travel millions of light years to an alien planet. Humanity has also created another devastating weapon in the MD-500. Further proof that the creation of a device ensures its usage. It’s unstated, but my head canon suggests that a molecular detachment device was created for some altruistic purpose on Earth (perhaps deep core drilling) and co-opted by the military as an ultimate weapon.

The military battles of Ender’s Game are only ever seen in the safety of the fleet warships. There is no hand-to-hand combat as with Starship Troopers or Predators. It presents a more sanitized idea of war, with the characters not actually having to get their hands dirty. This plays into the themes of the film as well, and the ethics behind the battles, even though the audience is told that thousands of soldiers die in the final assault, saving millions back at home. The only hands-on training the recruits receive is in the Battle Room. This is less about hand-to-hand combat and more about learning zero-g tactics that can be applied to space battles. As Ender is quick to understand, there is no up or down in space, and orientation in space battles is relative. It’s a tactic he applies to a battle with the Formic, sending his ships under the ice ring to blast the alien fleet from “below.” Apparently also a tactic that the Formics lack. This simulation room is the most engaging portion of the film, as audiences get to see Ender’s outside-the-box and three-dimensional thinking firsthand, so when he wins battles easily later, it can be attributed to this level of genius and insight.

The Final Frontier

At the time of release, I recall much mocking of the trailer for Ender’s Game due to it showing the final battle and the blasting of the Formic planet with the MD-500. It may not be something obvious to people who are unfamiliar with the plot. Though, as time progresses and trailers are studied and analyzed frame by frame due to sites like YouTube, putting key elements of the story (ie, Spoilers!) is something marketing departments do at their own risk. The film was also marked by a series of online boycotts at its time of release due to Orson Card’s negative views on homosexuality and LGBTQ rights. It raised awareness of the author’s ideas and how they may reveal thematic choices in his works, while forcing the production team and studio to acknowledge the controversy.

On a final note, Ender’s Game’s failings come on two fronts. The first is taking a 40-year-old story that deals with the child-savior trope and presenting it to modern audiences. While that was a popular format for fiction in the 80s, it feels dated and naive in the early 21st Century, especially with such a young cast (as opposed to twenty-somethings playing teenagers). The other is the attempt to jam what might be a three-hour film into less than two hours. Its story is set up with an open ending, presuming the idea of creating a franchise if this film did well, but the film feels concluded after the battle, with Ender’s trip into the caves being an extended epilogue. There are some elements that offer much satisfaction, but overall, Ender’s Game is just not as fun as it should be.

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