Man, tweens are so destructive! They get all angsty and destroy whole worlds. But then they make friends with giant alien ants, and it’s all Kumbaya. But there’s a fun sci-fi story here, no matter how silly it is when you really step back and think about it.
So okay, I didn’t read the books, because I was doing other stuff when they were popular, so I’ll just speak to the movie, okay? Okay. Thanks.
So we begin with what looks very much like what I would guess a real alien invasion battle might look like were it fought in the skies today (except I’d expect more nukes to be used, but whatever: that’s not politically correct, so we don’t see it). We also see a silly quote made by the future version of our main character, and it’s totally sexist, because the enemy he faces and destroys is led by a female, and he only uses the male pronoun. But never mind that, because there will be plenty of male humans to bully and beat up our hero, so maybe he’s talking about them; who knows. In any case, it’s about as fallacious as a lot of this movie is going to be, so it’s absolutely appropriate under the circumstances.
So after this battle scene of Earth’s first alien invasion, we hear voiceover dialog about how because we almost lost and millions of people were killed, they had to get serious and train only the most intelligent children. This is an important point, because most of the youths we see in this movie are meathead bully types, and I went to school with a bunch of them, and I can tell you from experience, they’re not very smart. So I guess the millions of people killed must have been all the intelligent children of Earth (except for Ender and his few heroic compatriots later in the film), so they had to do the best they could. (Or maybe the government used Common Core testing to determine who the smartest kids are? That might explain the crop of “brilliant” recruits we see paraded here in the first half of the film.)
The problem here is obvious: there isn’t much time, and the filmmakers don’t know how to make Ender seem super smart, so they attempt to accomplish this by making everyone else seem dumb. Well, that’s fine if everyone is supposed to be dumb, but using this tactic when everyone is supposed to be intelligent is essentially falling into the trap of what Jabootu refers to as the “informed attribute”*: that’s when, in a movie, a script requires a character to possess a quality the actor does not demonstrate on film; and so, to make sure we understand that this character possesses said quality, the movie has to tell us. And so, the movie tells us that all these people Ender deals with are super intelligent, even though they mostly act dumb, arrogant, self-serving, bullying, cowardly, etc. (I’m assuming they are using the informed attribute out of necessity, but they may be doing it because they’re lazy, or not creative enough to show how he’s smarter than other very smart people. Or else perhaps they are assuming their audience won’t be smart enough to notice such things, so they dumb everything down, which is a very bad idea, I think, because audiences are smarter than they get credit for being most of the time, and it’s insulting and annoying.)
So then we get to the training part of the movie, and it’s pretty good, excepting the part about all the kids being so smart, of course. (Well, and the fact that they have an arrogant, abusive bully leading a group of their geniuses who might have killed Ender and left the Earth open for conquest: pretty idiotic, I should think. But the actor playing this part is good, and it does manipulate our emotions and make us root for and bond with Ender's character, I guess. But it seems pretty lazy and nonsensical to me anyway.) In fact, they don’t tell us, but it’s obvious pretty quickly that everyone is there only to help Ender show his mettle and learn how to deal with adversity. So then the thing about all the smartest children was a lie, unless it was merely misleading, and they weeded him out in some process we don’t get to see. In any case, this is the best part of the movie, and it has some fun ideas that you might expect to see played out at some corporate morale-boosting resort or something (but in the future, since they all wear a lot of futuristic outfits and helmets and such, and they’re in space and all). It’s great to see the girl from the recent True Grit remake, and the kid from Hannah Montana as well: always welcome faces in any production. And that goes for Abigail Breslin as well. These young actors shine along with our titular hero. (Viola Davis is also wonderful to see in anything, and Harrison Ford is good if uneven as a disciplined bureaucratic jingoist military pessimist, in contrast to his undisciplined rouge from Star Wars. I can only guess that’s why he was cast in this, as opposed to someone else.)
So anyway, just to ruin it for everyone, I want to say that in the final simulation test, Ender uses his strategic skills we’ve seen hammered into our heads as relevant to defeat the alien home planet, but it turns out that it was the real war, and he has won and destroyed the Formics home planet. But there’s another huge plot hole here, as we’re told that shooting the weapon that’s used here unbonds molecular structures and turns everything it hits into disconnected atoms, unbonded atomic particles, or whatever nonspecific nothingness. But they shoot it at the alien home planet, and then we see images of it burning as though it had lots of erupting volcanoes on it, and that’s entirely inconsistent to what we’ve been told. Well, we were also told the war was just a simulation, so is this another lie? (Maybe it is, as we were also shown that the Formics were approaching to attack, and that time was out to find a commander to defend Earth, and that ends up being a lie also, I guess.) Well we don’t find out, because apparently it’s more important to see our hero bond with a bug and then fly off to help seed a new colony for the Formics that we’ll have to destroy later, I guess.
And so a war film becomes an anti-war film, even though all the reasoning that condemns the war is completely one-sided and without actual basis in fact whatsoever. (Ender says he psychically bonded with the Formic queen hiding in the forward military base, but how does he know she wasn’t lying? There's no proof whatsoever, so it’s just more pacifist hippie propaganda. {They should have a post-credit sequence where the baby Formic queen sneaks up on Ender and eats his brain. Oops! Ha, ha: hoodwinked!}) But hey, there’s only a limited amount of time in a movie, right? So screw logic and facts: lets get to the indoctrination moral, which is that war is wrong, man, and you should always let your enemy win, because they might not kill you anyway. After all, to understand your enemy is to love them (Oh, oops; I mean: him), and that’s why our armed forces love al Qaida; and why Russia, England, France, the United States, etc., loved Hitler and the Nazis. Oh, whoops: don’t think about that, because it will make our hero’s wisdom seem naïve, and frankly, dumb. (And we can’t have that, because he’s supposed to be so smart! And he’s the hero!)
BTW: I love Ben Kingsley in this movie. His character is the big hero from the last war, but the movie makes it clear that his victory was inadvertent, as he had no idea it would work. But it did, and so he helps Ender all he can. But his character is no genius, and does not claim to be one. But he is initially presented as this all-knowing sage, and the more we get to know him, the more down-to-Earth and mundane he is revealed to be, while still being brave and wise from his experience. But if he was what his legend claims him to be, they wouldn’t need Ender, now would they? And then we wouldn’t have our movie.
* Jabootu is a website that reviews bad movies for comedic effect, and they have a glossary of terms they have invented (mostly) themselves which define elements and characteristics of bad movies. Everyone should read this list, as it’s simultaneously amazingly perceptive, accurate, and enlightening. If bad movie directors would read this website and familiarize themselves with this glossary, they might make better movies. In fact, I think Ken Begg, the mind behind this website, should be a well-paid consultant to movie studios to help them avoid the pitfalls that make movies suck.
Anyway, here is the Jabootu glossary:
