Ender's Game (2013)
Directed by Gavin Hood
Based on the classic novel by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game is the story of the Earth's most gifted children training to defend their homeplanet in the space wars of the future.
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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.
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.
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 .
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.”
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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.
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.
“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.
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…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.
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.