Lots of glitz, completely devoid of substance

Rating: 5/10 (26 April 2014)

The basic premise of the movie is an interesting one, and like Gravity, there's lots of spectacular camera work and effects, but once you get beyond that, you realise how little substance there is to the movie.
Rather than skilfully building a movie by developing the plot and taking the characters on a journey, each character comes fully completed in his/her final form from the first second you see them on the screen. From start to finish, the movie is nothing but a series of feel-good snapshots, rather than a well developed story.
The movie is nothing more than one stereotype after another, bound together by the most ridiculous logic from start to finish.
The frustrating thing is, it had so much potential and the characters were mostly tremendously likable - not that they had much chance to be anything but.
The movie feels like nothing but a series of set pieces, but lacks any meat. But for all that, thanks to spectacular use of technology, Ender's Game does manage to be extremely watchable, even if it leaves you feeling utterly cheated at the end.
To be honest, it's a movie that had me asking WTF from start to finish, so to have a ridiculous, unrealistic ending in which the main character acts in a way (and allowed to act that way by his superiors) that defeats the entire purpose of the rest of the movie, is no less lazy than the rest of the film.
An outstanding cast could have been given so much more to chew on.
I'd like to read the book to see if Card did better, but since I discovered he's a bigot, I don't want to let him have any of my money.