Gorgeous to look at, but ultimately disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (27 October 2013)

There's no escaping it, Ender's Game is a fantastically pretty movie. From the opening shots of fighter jets engaging in dogfights with swarms of alien craft, to the ethereal sequences of teenagers in spacesuits drifting through zero gravity gaming arenas, this is one movie that's a veritable feast for the eyes. It's also deeply engaging on a moral and ethical level, raising a great many questions about the ethics of the military, the morality of leadership and whether war can ever be a tool to prevent war. It's a treat for the brain and one that will leave you grappling with philosophical ideas of what civilisation loses when it does what it can to survive.
The trouble though, is it doesn't make for an exciting movie.
Why? Well because despite all those eye-popping, bombastic space battles that cropped up in the trailer, there's very little war or danger to be found. And despite being just shy of two hours, it also ends in a rather abrupt and unsatisfying way, leaving Enders Game as a very frustrating cinema experience.
Set in the distant future, it sees humanity as a mighty galactic power with bases on far flung planets and capable of dispatching vast war fleets in the blink of an eye. But it's a power that's consumed by paranoia. See, there's another race in the galaxy known as Formics who once came dangerously close to exterminating us. Convinced that another attack is imminent, the Earth military led by Colonel Graff (a perpetually scowling Harrison Ford) sets about recruiting large numbers of teenagers to direct their war craft. Because, teenagers are good at Command And Conquer right? There's no holes in that plan, shut up.
Best of the bunch is Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield - excellent), a child prodigy being groomed as Julius Caesar for the lightspeed era. When we first meet him, he's beating a bully at a video game, then minutes later beating the living daylights out of him in a biology classroom. Soon, he's being shipped into orbit to complete some intense training and get shouted at by Xaro Xhoan Daxos. And this is where the film ends.
Well, not really. It goes on for a good hour and forty minutes longer, but the training never finishes. No matter how many futuristic-paintball games and war simulators he gets into, the war itself never really kicks off. Sure, all the scenes of spaceships bursting into flame, drones zipping through asteroids and lasers bursting through ice look incredible, but they're just war-simulations. And videogames are only exciting when you play them yourself, there's more tension and danger in Ender's shower room brawl with a rival student than in any of the intergalactic battle scenes.
***BIG SPOILER WARNING***
Consequently, you spend the entire film waiting for a war that never properly starts. Except surprise! He was fighting it for real all along! From the comfort of a war room. Then comes one incredibly contrived ending with a conveniently-easy-to-find alien and before Ender can even draw breath after finishing the closing monologue, the credits are rolling. Uh...great.
All of which makes for an infuriating end to what was a deeply promising film. Given the complexity of the issues it raises, it's even more annoying. This had the possibility of being Starship Troopers for kids but with an intellectual depth beyond that of the average Hollywood movie. Instead it turns out like a two hour version of the Kobayashi Maru sequence from the first Star Trek movie where somebody points out that they've blown up a real Klingon Bird of Prey at the end.