Asa Butterfield, is the movie, the rest doesn't get in his way

Rating: 9/10 (3 November 2013)

I liked Asa Butterfield in Hugo, but there he played a child, a special child, true, but still a child. He was acting and reacting to things that exist in our world, some more fantastic than others but at the base they were all things that one can find in the world. Ender Wiggin is nothing like anyone he could encounter. A kid, a genius, a master of strategy, an intellectual grownup trapped in the body of a child with compassion and understanding far surpassing his tender age. And he pulls this one off superbly. As he's now Asa Butterfield is one of the finest actors around. The rest of the film is not important, it is a shallowing down of the book, but it does keep the core plot intact. It does some stupid Hollywood changes like hinting a budding romance between Ender and Petra, and since the child employment laws force the age of the actors a few years above the age of the characters in the story, it almost makes sense to shift the prepubescent friendships of the book with a post pubescent budding romance. Luckily they didn't lay to much story lines on this change, and didn't push it too far. I guess the Orson Scott Card masterpiece is such a classic by now that even Hollywood scriptwriters didn't dare tinkering with it too much. Visually the film is of a very high class, despite not using the 3D trick that could be easily justified in this case they still made me feel slightly disorientated more than once when entering the weightless battle room. The bottom line is a long one in this case, it's not the masterpiece the book is, but it treats the story with due respect; it eliminates some of the brightest aspect of the book like forecasting the internet and social networks as early as 1985 and understanding their implications before they were there to see. And still the lead character of Ender is so strong and its portrayal by Asa Butterfield is so amazing that everything else pales into insignificance, which makes this movie worth seeing even as a prelude to reading the book itself.