A Real Lack of High Flying Substance

Orson Scott Card is a prolific author. He’s written over a hundred works, with a career stretching back to 1979, with his most famous work, the novel that put him on the map, being Ender’s Game. I had a friend that got me that novel back when I was in college (they actually got me the whole run of the Ender books that were out at the time, but for this review only the first is relevant) and I thought it was really good. Tense, tight, a solid sci-fi thriller with an absolutely brutal twist ending. It made me want to read more of his books, at least in that series, and though those books weren’t anywhere near as good or interesting as the original novel that kicked it off, they were still interesting reads for a time.

Of course, then I found out about his politics and I had a hard time picking up any of his other works. Not even used. Not even when they were free. That’s because Card is an out and proud homophobe. Card seriously can’t stop talking about how much he hates the gay lifestyle and how he thinks homosexuality is wrong. That gay marriage should be illegal. That, somehow, gay people being married will lead to them destroying the very fabric of the American government.

But then, he also voted for Trump and we saw how well that President treated the Constitution. Heads up, Card: the call is coming from inside the house.

Regardless, many of his political views came to a head around the time that Ender’s Game, the movie based on his novel, arrived in 2013. It was public knowledge at that point (and years before) just who Card really was, and for many of us that was already the breaking point. When it was suggested that audiences should boycott the film, plenty of us had already been planning to. The best way to deal with an awful celebrity is to vote with your wallets, and for me, Orson Scott Card ended up on the same list as Mel Gibson, Mark Wahlberg, and Sean Connery: human trash who I would never fund again. Skipping this movie was an easy choice.

The movie did come out, though, and eventually someone gave me a copy of it in hopes that I’d review the site (no money went from my hands into Card’s coffers). Since it was there, and it was available guilt-free, I took the time to watch and review the movie, and I have to say: even without the boycott, this film wasn’t going to be a winner at the Box Office. It managed to pull in $125 Mil against a $115 Mil budget, and even then it feels like it made too much. This is a long, boring, poorly acted film that, if Hollywood had any sense, would have been shelved and never shown, taken as a tax write off to spare all of us from having to watch this tedious waste of celluloid.

The film (like the novel) follows Ender Wiggin (a character with a name that feels like it was pulled from The Simpsons, portrayed in the film by Asa Butterfield). Ender, as we’re told time and again, is a brilliant young teen. He has the compassion of his sister, Valentine (Abigail Breslin) but the ruthless cunning of his brother, Peter (Jimmy Pinchak). Enrolled in a pre-military program, Ender is seemingly kicked out of the program at his school after getting into a fight with some bullies (which, in fairness to Ender, they started). But as it turns out this was just the final test in this first stage of the program, and Ender passed, allowing him to move on to Battle School.

This school, up at a station floating around Earth, is designed to train the kids to be leaders in the coming war against the Formics, an insectile-like race who had come to Earth 50 years before to set a colony and then had to be fought back by the forces of the planet. The commander of Battle School, Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford), thinks that Ender could be the one they’ve been waiting for, the genius kid that can get through Battle School and then take over the fleet, striking the decisive blow to end the war with the Formics on their home planet, once and for all. That is if Ender doesn’t break under the pressure first.

While Ender’s Game wasn’t a long novel, somehow at two hours the film feels compact, rushed, and not very well organized. There’s a lot that happens in the novel, most of it enthralling (honestly, I hate saying that about any of Card’s works, but the book actually was really good), and the movie struggles to get any of it into its story with depth and impact. Large chunks of the novel are breezed through in the movie, giving us tiny snippets of the overall picture so that the movie can then move on to the next major plot point (and breeze through that as well). The film simply doesn’t take the time to make anything feel full or substantial.

I’m not normally a fan of making two-part films out of books, but Ender’s Game legitimately feels like it needs it. Hell, I actually think the story would benefit from being a multi-part miniseries instead of a film. Anything to actually let the story breathe and develop everyone as characters. Because that’s a big issue with this film: since it rushes and rushes and has to cram in as much as it can to a condensed two-hour runtime, the characters never come into focus. They’re cardboard standees setup with lines delivered about them and from them, but they never feel like people.

Ender has a family, and everyone in it (maybe aside from Peter) are supposed to matter to him, but we never get a real sense that anyone in the family matters or cares. Ender sends a lot of letters to Valentine, his sister, but there’s no emotion there for us to latch only. Ender is supposed to be stressed out and struggling at times in Battle School, but the film barely spends any time at the Battle School for us to understand what it means, what the training is like, or just how brilliant of a military mind Ender might be. And then, when it comes time for the last act, when Ender is put in charge of a fleet during “training simulations”, we still barely see him do much commanding to develop him. He’s never a real character. Not at all.

Most of that blame goes to the production team for making a boring, rushed project out of a pretty good book (again, I hate having to admit that). But not helping matters is that two of the leads are just so awful in this movie. Butterfield is a waste as Ender, barely finding the right emotions to give, scene to scene, making Ender, our focus point character, into a vacant void for most of the movie. He probably didn’t know how to act when surrounded by green screen, but whether that’s fair to put on a kid or not, he does drag down the film. And then Harrison Ford comes in and ruins it the rest of the way, sleepwalking through the movie as Ender’s commander. It was just a terrible pair of performances.

Not that I think they had much to work with, anyway, as the script never trusts us with figuring stuff out. At every turn the film has the characters lecture us about their expectations, their feelings, their actions. “He’s a genius that’s going to save us all,” Ford’s Graff says right at the start of the film, which takes all the suspense out of the movie. “Oh, well I guess that’s that, then.” Then, scene after scene, people have to explain everything to us even when, within the context of the film, they should already know what they’re talking about. It’s ridiculously bad writing on every level. A flat script for a flat movie.

I was happy at the time when Ender’s Game failed at the Box Office. Hell, I still am because keeping money out of Card’s pockets feels like a worthwhile endeavor. At the same time, though, if we had to get an Ender’s Game movie (we didn’t need to have one, really we didn’t) then at least it should have been better than this. There’s probably a way to make a good movie or set of movies or miniseries out of Ender’s Game, but this absolutely wasn’t it.

At least we were spared having to see the really weird, later stories where Ender goes off and travels the galaxy talking for the dead. Seriously, those novels just got weird. We’re better off without.