Its main problem: it's just unjustly and uncompromisingly boring.

Rating: 3/10 (26 March 2018)

'Ender's Game (2013)' doesn't explain or even really explore anything, displaying not so much ambiguity but rather a total lack of the regard or ability to convey or establish any of its sub-surface and world-building plot elements, including its few but genuine deep ideas surrounding the morality of war, violence and the concept of 'winning' at such endeavours, which welcomely pop up here and there but are unfortunately shrouded in a mire of murky, dour self-seriousness, a schlocky and exposition-filled screenplay and boringly bad dialogue. That's the main problem with the piece, though, that it's just unjustly and uncompromisingly boring from beginning to end. The fact that it never gets out of the gate or backtracks on its one good, gut-wrenching moment become minor annoyances when you simply cannot care about anything happening on screen, since there's no engagement to come from the cardboard characters or clichéd plot and certainly not from the well-rendered but usually stakes-less action sequences. It's an extremely poor effort more adept at putting you to sleep than anything else, and it isn't even all that great at that. 3/10