--Soren Andersen (Seattle Times)
A couple of months ago, I read for the first time Orson Scott Card's 1985 classic, Ender's Game. I posted a short essay -- not a book review -- remarking on my initial reaction to the story. Last Saturday I saw the movie, which is now showing in theaters. I'm ignoring dismissive reviews I've read, offered by perhaps half of the film critics.
I found it to be a stirring and moving film. It forced me to read the book again for the second time in three months, an exercise that was well worth the time. It also forced me to bore Facebook friends with my praises.
The book was too well known and too frequently reviewed for me to add my own unoriginal thoughts to the clamor in the form of a formal review. So also with the film.
Let me just suggest that readers see the movie with an open mind, preferably after reading the book. The film illustrates dramatically on the screen the events and themes presented by the book, but the significance of those events and the importance of those themes really need the fuller exposition that the book provides. For example, much of the "action" in the book is devoted to the "games" that Ender and his fellow students play as preparation for what is anticipated to be an apocalyptic war with an alien race. The book shows how the games -- and the manipulations by those staging the games -- lead to Ender's growth. The movie can only compress the games into one or two episodes -- albeit, episodes that make vivid the mental pictures arising from the book's descriptions.
The movie has to to omit, in a two hour film, one of the book's major subplots -- the machinations of Ender's older brother and sister -- as intelligent as Ender, but for differing reasons unsuitable for Ender's military role -- who use the internet (a use for computers largely unknown by the general public when the book was published) to obtain vast worldwide political influence, anonymously, while still a couple of preadolescents.
An important theme of the book is how the military authorities deliberately deprived Ender of a childhood and with calculation forced him to live in loneliness and in psychological isolation from his classmates in order to focus his attention solely on the war games he was playing. The book shows the reasoning behind this deliberate cruelty, and the effect it had on Ender's mental state. The movie doesn't have the time to fully explain these policies, or to show the anguished private discussions among the officers who decide upon them. The movie, on the other hand, shows vividly their effect on the young genius who was already both sensitive and shy by nature -- but who also is coldly rational to the point of inflicting death on a bullying classmate as a calculated example to other potential bullies in the school.
In the book, Ender is six years old when recruited by the military, and eleven years old when he becomes supreme commander of Earth's interstellar military forces. It would be difficult to find an actor or actors in those age ranges capable of fulfilling the demands of the role. In the movie, Ender is recruited at age twelve, and his training is compressed into a much shorter period of time. Ender is played by a young-appearing fifteen year old actor, Asa Butterfield, who proves fully capable of displaying the enthusiasm, the physical agility, the sense of loneliness, the sensitivity, and the conflicted emotions that the part demands.
As for me, I'm hooked. I've downloaded the next book in the series, Speaker for the Dead, which I'm advised is a totally different sort of story. No matter. I'm willing to bet some more time on this author.
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