Breakneck Pacing Cripples this film

Rating: 5/10 (6 November 2013)

This movie could have been good. Damn good. The book is incredibly well loved: All of my friends have been freaking out over it, so i decided to give it a whirl. This movie has a bunch of kernels of good ideas. Ender's conflict between pacifism and militarism, his siblings representing the downfalls of either extreme, genocide as a means to reach peace, when is it right to exploit a child?... All great discussions for a long movie, or ideally, a series of movies or 2 season TV show. As it stands, trying to cram all of this into a 2 hour movie cripples it. At one point, a man says "I will never salute you".. .and ten minutes later he salutes Ender... but why? As far as I could tell, all Asa Butterfield did in those 10 minutes was win at laser tag. Literally. This type of sped up character development is prevalent throughout the movie. There is a plot twist towards the end, and I was just as surprised at the characters. The implications of children in was and the morality of genocide is explored well enough. But again, i think those ideas would have benefited from being explored over a couple of seasons of a TV show to give you time to attach to characters. Again, with the pace of this movie, you're whipped from one place to the next so quickly you don't have time to care, with rare exception On the plus side I love the visual style of this movie. It's gorgeous to look at. If you read and enjoyed the books, you'll probably get a kick out of it like everyone else I know. But as someone who doesn't know these characters, I felt like this movie was too much, too fast.