Ender's Game

Rating: 3/10 (4 November 2013)

Are you ready for this? "Ender's Game," written and directed by Gavin Hood, and based on a 1985 novel of the same name by Orson Scott Card (incidentally, a self-professed and obnoxiously vocal pillar of general intolerance of any person not like himself, and homosexuals especially), is set in a future when humanity comes under attack by an ant-like race of aliens and the solution is to draft a bunch of prepubescent kids (all boys and a single token girl, by the way) to use their gaming skills to command the fleet that will ultimately save nothing less than humanity itself. How's that for a storyline?
There's really not much good to say about "Ender's Game," unless you're a 14 year old boy whose greatest fantasy is to live in a video game, and there are, apparently and unfortunately, enough of those out there to make it worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an epic piece of crap like Ender's Game." Your average comic book has better character development and plot.
Over the past decade more and more "blockbusters" have been little more than CGI porn fests and that has come to be accepted, but Ender's game takes it to a new level (and the CGI isn't even that good) by way of a scene in which the main character actually becomes a character in a video game—as in there is no real life actor, the main character himself being a product of CGI. Talk about turning it up to eleven.
Ender Wiggin is played by Asa Butterfield, a particularly wooden young actor who has apparently mastered the ability to make his eyes water at will, a fact of which Director Hood makes great use in a failed attempt to imbue his main character with some semblance of life. Young Wiggin's greatest talent seems to be spouting such insights egarding conflict and enemy management as to humble even Sun Tzu. In between dropping these profound pearls he manages to lead to victory a team of completely interchangeable characters in a type of zero gravity, three dimensional billiards table batle ground A feat which so impresses the commander of "battle"school, one Colonel Hyrum Graff(Harrison Ford), that Wiggin is given command of the entire fleet.
Ford's character is a standard issue military hard ass, yet a noble one, who has sacrificed his own humanity for the greater good, understanding that in war there must be an acceptance of collateral damage not limited to loss of life, but including loss of innocence as well. Sound familiar? Ford tries to play Graff as gruff and ruthlessly pragmatic, but comes off as Harrison Ford trying to play gruff and ruthlessly pragmatic.
For some unfathomable reason Ben Kingsley makes an appearance as a Maori warrior complete with facial tattoos and the whole bit. It's hard to know what he needed more, the money or a new agent. If he keeps doing things like this, he just may have his knighthood revoked.