A good book and movie with occasionally outdated concepts

Rating: 7/10 (2 May 2018)

I'm going to discuss some plot points that could be considered spoilers, although I won't be giving away the (whole) ending.
The book this movie was based upon has long been a favorite of mine. I probably read it a good five or six times over the last few decades before I ever saw the movie, and I recommend the book as well as the movie. The story is an examination of the human relationship with violence. The way it effects us and our society, the ugliness of it as well as the necessity and seductiveness of it. The book also examines warfare strategy in some detail, although the movie spends less time on that aspect. The central premise isn't exactly novel: in the future humans encounter a hostile alien species and engage in a war for survival, with a focus on the rise of a brilliant child named Ender as humanities best hope for survival. What is more unique is the exploration of the idea that defeating a powerful enemy requires such intimate knowledge of them; their tactics, their society, and their perspective, so that eventually you come to empathize with them to some degree. In other words, victory should be derived from the complete comprehension of an enemy civilization and the necessary application of force required to achieve peaceful coexistence, but with a cognizance that your enemy is thinking and feeling and their society has value even if circumstance pits you against one another. It doesn't proffer the idea that war is completely evil or unjust, despite admitting the potentially horrific consequences of it, but rather that it shouldn't be entered into lightly or with the naive belief that it can be humane and glorious (i.e. 'just war' may not be an oxymoron, but 'humane warfare' is). These ideas are explored in both the movie and the book, although the book goes into much greater detail using allusions to the founding fathers of the United States via a series of opinion letters published under a pseudonym by his siblings.
Setting aside the stories quasi-acceptance of violence, which is a deeper question not suited for this forum, the book/movie has several conceits that are a little outdated, to my thinking. The first is the idea of children as military leaders. This plot point is inspired by the fact that children have a very high capacity for learning. There are a host of biological reasons for this, but I think that drawing the idea out to this extent is more dramatic and gimmicky than realistic. While it's true that children can learn certain skills such as languages and mathematics faster than adults, there are distinct limits to this. First of all, knowledge without experience can't be wielded very effectively. Part of the process of a maturing mind is discovering how information fits together and can be creatively recombined to face new challenges. The evidence for this is all around; there have been many child prodigies who went to some Ivy league school at 12 and completed one or more doctorates before leaving their teens, but if you look at the record of great literature or mathematical or scientific achievements, you won't find many references to great works by teenagers. I'm not trying to downplay the incredible potential, only pointing out that the creative spark that fuses raw knowledge into meaningful insight tends to come later in life, with a little perspective. So you might be able to stuff young minds made powerful by incredible neuroplasticity full of strategic theory and physics, but I have serious doubts that the product would be a 14-year-old Hannibal.
The second problem I have always had with this is the application of the "everything genius". This is one of the most over-used tropes concerning intelligence, because it seems intuitive even though it is wrong. The basic idea is if someone is a genius at one thing, then they must be a genius at everything. So a math prodigy can also play any musical instrument simply by hearing a piece played once or write great novels or become super warriors by calculating the angle of blows or whatever. The truth is this just isn't how genius works. A math prodigy might have trouble tying their shoes or be unable to comprehend grammar or some such. Because while genius is still a mystery, there is some evidence that it is basically a hyper-specialization of the mind. And hyper-specialization in one area means some other areas might not get the attention that even an average intellect would give them. The story explains that Ender was selected because he is a genius, and then shows him excelling at hand to hand combat, physics, mathematics, strategy, etc. Basically, he becomes the perfect human being, and the explanation, insufficiently, is that he's a genius.
My third issue is with the requirement for a gifted human commander to lead the troops. The story presents the idea that humanity needs this commander to handle the enormously difficult task of guiding the armada during battle while executing optimal battle strategy, etc. Every scene in both the book and the movie shows him acting as a battlefield commander only. There is no long-term strategy planning, he just shows up as the battle is about to start and has to see it thru to victory or defeat. The thing is, the story is set at some point in humanities future. Technological development has proceeded to the point where Ender uses a computer with a smooth brain-computer interface and the government is capable of installing a probe that literally see thru the main characters eyes. So my point is, there is no reason to expect that their computers aren't at least as good as ours, but in this day and age we can already see a near-future where that battlefield commander job would almost certainly be performed more capably by a computer than a human.
Chess, long held as the strategists proof of skills, fell first. When it happened it was a huge shock; people had long held the belief that no computer could ever truly be as good as the best human players. I remember reading many reasonable sounding arguments for why humans would always have the upper hand in chess, and once it was clear that not only could computers match the best human players but were now in fact pulling ahead to a degree that we were unlikely to ever catch up, those same arguments switched to the game of Go. And, of course, now computers have pulled ahead in that as well. The fact is that companies like Microsoft now claim their systems have superhuman language comprehension (they understand the spoken word better than we do), have pulled even in language to language translation capability, and are drawing in on image recognition as well. All of which is to say that in future warfare, the control and direction of battlefield units will almost certainly be AI driven. It may be scary, but this is just an area where the machines outpace us. So Ender would not have been necessary, unless E.N.D.E.R. was some acronym like Efficient Neuro Data Event Responder or something.
And finally my biggest problem with the story. The entire war is eventually revealed *SPOILER ALERT* to be the result of an inability to establish communication between the humans and aliens. Ok, I can see that. But then there is a subplot where a mind-controlled game (which exists in the story to facilitate communication with the aliens and to keep us wondering about Ender's true nature) mysteriously includes images of the aliens and alien worlds. It turns out that the aliens hacked the game and placed these in it in a desperate attempt to communicate with Ender. Here is where I call BS. There is simply no way you could understand human technology to the degree you could hack into a mind controlled program and alter the content and not be capable of at least basic communication. It simply requires too much knowledge of us and thus the way we think and communicate. Computer programming may seem like symbolic nonsense to a non-tech, but it is actually deeply rooted in language and math , and of course a machine that can directly interpret our thoughts to drive its activity must almost by definition include a road map of how we communicate. How else would such a computer interpret commands?
All in all though I'm nitpicking. Some of the ideas may be outdated or force conditions convenient to the plot (the straw-man bullies Ender fights that cap each section of his training during his rise to commander are another example of this), but the movie manages to retain the underlying ideas of the book very faithfully and the visuals are excellent. So is the acting and editing; the movie moves very smoothly and maintains your attention well. I liked it enough to buy it for my movie collection and would recommend it to others.