“Ender Wiggin isn’t a killer. He just wins—thoroughly.” Director Gavin Hood brings these words to life in his adaptation of the classic science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. Visually and viscerally, he succeeds in creating a brutal movie about morals and ethics.
Ender’s Game tells the story of Ender Wiggin as he moves from an Earth-based military academy to an extraterrestrial base called Battle School, where children are trained to be the military geniuses of tomorrow. The movie takes place after the Formic Wars, an alien invasion that almost destroyed Earth.
While the movie proves visually stunning and boasts an aggressive, dramatic score the accompanying camerawork jerks viewers around. There isn’t enough time to get settled into the plot or get emotionally invested in the characters before the action grabs hold of the film.
Ender fights with fellow students, has a conflicted family situation, and is forced into social isolation by his superiors. All the while, he tries to understand and empathize with his enemy. We see these moments fly by on screen, but we don’t feel them. They go by before we have enough time to register them. It’s not until the second half of the movie that Hood overcomes these shortcomings by slowing down the plot and letting the story run on its own.
Although the film has an impressive cast, including Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, and newcomer Asa Butterfield, as well as strong instrumentation and stunning cinematography, the film’s strength lies in the moral questions it addresses. Ender Wiggin, the protagonist, is a child soldier. He was designed by the military to wipe out an entire species—the Formics.
As Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) pragmatically puts it: “It’s either us, or them.” And the movie does not pull punches in showing the cost of a social Darwinist mentality.
At the beginning of the movie, Ender says, “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.” Ender knows he must destroy his enemies in order to protect his family and his home, but he has little control in the matter and suffers for the actions he’s taken. He lives in a world where adults control the ebb and flow of knowledge and Ender only knows he is an important tool in it.
Ultimately, the film argues that the only way we can truly know and defeat our enemy is by loving them. Ender’s Game makes us love people, makes us hurt when we see them suffer, and makes us fear who we can become. It is only when we truly love and understand who we are though, that we break down the decisions we’ve made and come to terms with their consequences. This dynamic makes the movie brutal to watch, but it’s also what makes it great. Hood’s interpretation of our favorite childhood sci-fi might start out rushed, but it’s well worth seeing Wiggin to the end.
