Gavin Hood
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Starship Troopers (1997)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
influenced Ender's Game (2013)
Themes Plot Visuals
With shades of Starship Troopers and a Disney Channel sense of cultural diversity, director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) flirts with fascism while avoiding some of the other traps Card created in his narrative.
I couldn’t help but think of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, another avenue for bug-like aliens attacking Earth, and how much fun that was.
Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" -- a science-fiction classic that is in part a rebuttal to "Starship Troopers" -- envisioned a war of extermination against another bug race, and ended with a similar breakthrough of psychological contact with the inhuman enemy.
In some ways, Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" is Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" rewritten as a young-adult novel, but with the same monstrous insect invaders and clear-eyed, conformist defenders.
We see the initial alien attack in newsreel flashbacks on television stations that have adopted Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers-style, neo-fascist aesthetic.
This Sundance premiere will inspire comparisons to Spotlight and The Post — not to mention The Report , which also debuted in Park City.
It shares a lot of DNA with recent awards season darlings like Spotlight and The Post but, just like those films, this is a movie that couldn’t be more timely in communicating the power and importance of legitimate, investigative journalism.
Official Secrets is akin to other stellar films of this same genre like Spotlight and All the President’s Men.
Unfortunately, while Gun’s story is certainly worth telling and this is a well-intentioned, solid film with fine work from Knightley, “Official Secrets” is too heavy-handed and drab, and falls far short of procedural thrillers such as “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight” and “The Post” or broadly entertaining whistleblower stories such as “Erin Brockovich.”
Coming off of the pulse-pounding military suspenser Eye in the Sky, and understandably feeling the need to distinguish his film from a stolid BBC teledrama, Hood works to thicken the intrigue of his whistleblower story with swaths of a wonky journalistic tale (think Spotlight) and a legal crusade (think On the Basis of Sex).
This is no Spotlight (2015) or The Post (2017).
Asa Butterfield’s half-pint is marked out as a master tactician, conditioned to kill at junior boot camp, in scenes reminiscent of a Young Full Metal Jacket , and given the hard sell when it comes to the kind of preventative war beloved of military hawks everywhere.
Ender is brought to an orbiting space station for Battle School, where he and a number of young recruits are subject to boot camp led by barking drill sergeants – it’s reminiscent of “Full Metal Jacket,” except PG-13.
The cadets are put into competing groups under tough drill sergeants (shades of "Full Metal Jacket") and play a combat game under weightless conditions that bears more than a passing resemblance to Quidditch - one of the film's nods to " Harry Potter ."
Like most movies, “Ender’s Game” could use more laughs, but there’s some built-in black humor to seeing junior school and high school kids endure scenes derived from “Full Metal Jacket” and “From Here to Eternity.”
It’s like “Harry Potter” meets “ Full Metal Jacket ,” and while that’s certainly an intriguing mash-up, the movie doesn’t quite live up to the book’s reputation.
The book and the movie both focus on the basic training of Ender and his fellow cadets, with tough Sergeant Dap ( Nonso Anozie, from Game of Thrones ) shouting at the kids as if this were a middle-school fantasy remake of Full Metal Jacket ; say, Full Metal Rocket.
Independence Day (1996)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
influenced Ender's Game (2013)
Themes Plot Visuals
The traditional language of space opera -- stretching from Buck Rogers to "Star Wars" -- isn't the only way to portray inter-species combat; great science-fiction novels like Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" have proved that.
The backstory of "Ender's Game" falls in line with other "hostile alien invasion" films like "Independence Day" and "War of the Worlds."
The futuristic visual cues lifted from “Avatar,” “Independence Day” and “Star Wars” are too numerous to mention.
I even liked Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham, the legendary pilot who apparently learned alien fighting tactics from Randy Quaid in Independence Day .
Quase surgindo como uma espécie de continuação de Independence Day, já que seu início remete diretamente ao desfecho daquele longa, Ender’s Game é escrito e dirigido por Gavin Hood, um cineasta sul-africano cuja mediocridade pode ser constatada não só no trabalho que inexplicavelmente o projetou internacionalmente (Infância Roubada), mas também em seus esforços seguintes: o razoável O Suspeito e o pavoroso X-Men Origens: Wolverine .
The film seems to be in a rush to set out its post-invasion stall and we’re left with a film which places its emphasis on Cassie mooning over Evan (the scene where she virtually flutters her eyelashes on seeing him taking a topless wash in a lake can only elicit sniggers from the audience) and scenes which evoke unwanted memories of the lifeless Ender’s Game as the military-enlisted kids are trained for battle.
This is a staggeringly incompetent piece of filmmaking, which takes two wholly different films—one’s a teen romance with dystopian trappings, like The Hunger Games; the other’s a teen action-adventure film in the paranoid vein, like Ender’s Game—and tries to weld them together with shoddy dialogue and hormones.
He’s now a child recruit in a new scheme the U.S. army has to combat the aliens — very Ender’s Game — and Cassie must get to the Ohio base where he’s being trained, and where, we see, everyone keeps talking about “the fifth wave” of attacks they presume is imminent.
And the military-movie posturing between the kid recruits comes across as just short of laughable, as though the film is shooting for Ender's Game coldness, and instead winds up with a G-rated, junior-grade version of Starship Troopers camp.
If it's not The Maze Runner, Tomorrow When The War Began or Ender's Game, then it's a dystopian variant on a story of struggle and survival: The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, for example.
Audiences will be able to pinpoint the exact moment at which The 5th Wave starts to buckle under its franchise obligations, as well as the debts it owes to recent entries in this genre, from Kevin MacDonald’s more nightmarish How I Live Now to Gavin Hood’s Ender’s Game adaptation.
The Last Starfighter (1984)
Directed by Nick Castle
influenced Ender's Game (2013)
Plot Themes Visuals
But then again, The Last Starfighter came out in 1984 with some of the same ideas, and it was a lot more fun.
Ender is a whiz at computer-controlled war games, but to win the real battle he must become a cold-blooded killer – so we're basically talking The Last Starfighter meets Heart of Darkness .
Like The Last Starfighter and War Games, Ender’s Game is very much porn for video game addicts.
Director Gavin Hood lets you know right away that this ain’t camp like “The Last Starfighter”; in an early scene, Ender’s implanted head monitor is removed messily as he shrieks.
Card’s military meritocracy, on the screen, plays like “Starship Troopers” without a tongue-in-cheek touch to its fascism, “The Last Starfighter” without the wit.
This “Ender’s Game” film will seem entirely familiar to those who’ve seen such films as “Starship Troopers,” “Star Wars” and “The Last Starfighter.”
Indeed, comparisons between Ender’s Game and The Hunger Games are inevitable, but the key similarity between the two is that neither film really explores or, in the case of The Hunger Games, even acknowledges the disturbing brutality that lies at the core of their intricately-constructed worlds.
Like "The Hunger Games" and the Harry Potter saga, this is a story about the maturation of a personality — a misfit called to greatness — yet we don't really see Ender learning anything, let alone changing.
But film studios are as hot as ever on building young adult franchises, trying to replicate the lightning in a bottle success of “Harry Potter,” “Twilight,” and “The Hunger Games.”
Burdening children with the consequences of violence is increasingly commonplace in mainstream filmmaking these days – even the clean-scrubbed cherubs of “Harry Potter” were getting pretty tormented by the Deathly Hallows stages, while the extreme parable of “The Hunger Games” took its underage characters into a realm of post-”Lord of the Flies” bloodlust, albeit with PG-13 restrictions.
She’s smart and ballsy and Hood offers just the slightest hint of an attraction between Ender and Petra, but thankfully never comes close to turning the film into a cheesy teen soap like “The Hunger Games.”
Much in the same vein as The Hunger Gamesâand, of course, The Lord of the Flies long before itâEnder's Game taps into the brutality and ruthlessness of which children are capable.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
Themes Visuals
What made “X2,” “Spider-Man 2,” and “The Dark Knight” such powerful films was their ability to combine real-world themes with fantastic elements while never losing sight of what makes their characters unique and compelling.
"X-Men Origins: Wolverine" is not nearly as visually or creatively inspired as the recent " With Sam Raimi's wondrous, grandly-scaled " Spider- Man films and Christopher Nolan's complex, haunting " The Dark Knight " raising the bar so high on what can be accomplished in comic book and superhero movies, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" falls more in line with infamous duds like the Halle Berry-starring " Catwoman " and unnecessary " Daredevil " spinoff " Elektra ."
You could go all the way to the top and look at the believable world and the grit of “The Dark Knight” to see why but you need only look at Singer’s “X-Men” films, both of which were far more unpredictable and interesting than “Origins”.
Christopher Nolan did something ingenious with the Joker in The Dark Knight.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is no The Dark Knight.
Like Fernando "City of God" Meirelles, Gavin Hood is definitely a filmmaker to keep a close eye on.
What does it say that this South African export won the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film when the similar but more shattering City of God didn't even place back in 2003?
Director Gavin Hood keeps the movie moving at a breezy, unsentimental clip with a fast-paced, gritty style similar to City Of God, while energetic Kwaito music blasts throughout the picture.
A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as City of God relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc: the tough guy humanized by a cute kid.
Writer-director Gavin Hood easily could’ve stripped down Athol Fugard’s novel of personal responsibility and cultural empathy into a Hallmark-esque distillation of “City of God.” Instead, Hood retained this redemption song’s minor key — bullets, blood and beatings meant to illustrate a descent into dangerous living.
With its unflinching look at impoverished youth running rampant, brandishing handguns and attitude in equally volatile amounts, "Tsotsi" invites comparisons with the brilliant Brazilian film "City of God" ("Cidade de Deus").
But in compressing Ender's journey aboard the battle school from six years into one, he's erased certain details along the way, such as how the laser tag matches inform the piloting of spaceships later on and exactly how Ender's dual-wielding Christ Pose of an Antonio Banderas impression circa “Desperado” singles him out for leadership qualities in one instant.
Movies like Michael Mann’s “The Insider” (1999) revived the genre for the new millennium, and the lies of the Iraq War brought on a whole new wave of rueful and truthful suspense films: “Fair Game” (2010), about the Valerie Plame affair; Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” (2016); “The Post” (2017), about the Pentagon Papers in the 1960s.
But Hood frames it with the energy of journalistic thrillers like “All the President’s Men” or “The Insider,” giving us a tour through an early 2000s newsroom environment.
To date, The Insider probably represents the most compelling whistleblower story to make it to the big screen and, although the subject matter is different, Official Secrets generates in the viewer the same sense of outrage.
That said, it does borrow heavily from quite a few other sources, with shades of “Lord of the Flies,” “The Giver,” “Ender’s Game,” “Euphoria” and any number of space madness films.
While playing into fluoride conspiracy theories, it’s in keeping with elements of Huxley’s Brave New World and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, where technological hubris and desperation create a whole new level of dysfunction (and utilizing similar teen parameters like Ender’s Game , 2013).
“Ender’s Game” is about a military training school/prep academy that references movies such as “Star Wars,” “The Right Stuff,” “Star Trek,” “War Games,” “If…” and the list goes on.
" Star Wars meets Harry Potter " proclaims the poster, but with its children thrown into life-and-death scenarios and its assembling of a team of misfits to do battle in space it perhaps feels more closely aligned with The Hunger Games and JJ Abrams's first Star Trek (it shares creative talent in the form of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman).
A kind of belligerent “Harry Potter in Outer Space” or “Hunger Games”-meets-“Star Trek,” the film, based on a 1985 science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, tells the coming-of-age-tale of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin (Asa Butterfield).
He'd give Captain Kirk a serious run at Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru scenario.
The film sort of follows the tenor of Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) in which significantly older John Wayne trains a platoon of young men and readies them for war, and they then fight the war.
…able to seem as cocky as Top Gun Tom Cruise while also managing to retain the underdoggedness of a Karate Kid Ralph Macchio.
Ford, so great earlier this year in "42," is a piece of wood in a beret; Viola Davis’ sympathetic psychologist is all sad-eyed looks, and Ben Kingsley has Maori face tattoos and an accent that suggest he teleported in from “Iron Man 3.” Hood’s script, from Orson Scott Card’s book, is cut-rate “Top Gun” for ’tweens.
“Eye in the Sky” is a nifty British procedural in the tick-tock “Homeland” vein — you know, “10:20 AM, Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi, Kenya,” followed by “4:22 AM, Surrey, England” — that aspires to be the “Zero Dark Thirty” of the drone war.
Appropriately for a post- Zero Dark Thirty mediation on the War On Terror, Helen Mirren is in full “I’m the motherfucker” mode as long-serving U.K. Colonel Katherine Powell, whose ongoing pursuit of a radicalized British citizen has led her—and the drone-mounted American missile array she commands—to a hideout in Nairobi.
But Jonathan instructs him to resist the urge, and this advice is largely what leads the adult Clark (now played by Henry Cavill) to wander the backroads with no real purpose, a bearded laborer who takes any job he can find (these scenes, combined with Clark's shaggy whiskers, bring to mind Hugh Jackman's wanderings in X-Men and X-Men Origins: Wolverine).
Lifting classic imagery from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” director Gavin Hood (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) seems entirely oblivious to that fact that Stanley Kubrick’s 45-year-old visuals remain far more spectacular than his CG cheez whiz.
The battle school, where Ender’s Game is mostly set, really does feel a world away, with hints of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there’s as much action as there are thought provoking moral issues – not just about the (ab)use of kids, but about the fog of war.
“Ender’s Game” is about a military training school/prep academy that references movies such as “Star Wars,” “The Right Stuff,” “Star Trek,” “War Games,” “If…” and the list goes on.
In the 1950s, adolescent alienation meant Sal Mineo’s Christ figure dying in the embrace of his surrogate parents in “Rebel Without a Cause.”