Oh normal circadian rhythm, how
I've missed you. It's been a phenomenal couple of weeks, but a few nights of
truly solid sleep have been so very welcome. Extra Life, however, has needed no
such recharge and is continuing to bring in donations which summed to nearly
$3.9 million USD as of earlier today. If you'd like to get in the gaming
marathon goodness, but came across Extra Life late in the year, or were one of
those gamers adversely impacted by one or more of the four DDoSs that assailed
the original event on November 2nd, then you're in luck. Extra Life is hosting a make-up day tomorrow, November 9th.
The gentle crawl out of sleep
deprivation and back to some semblance of functionality has allowed me to dive
headfirst into the plethora of geeky cinematic offerings being released this
month. Seriously, between Thor
2: the Dark World, The
Hunger Games: Catching Fire (and
it's strangely star-studded parody The
Starving Games) and the film at the center of this post you could feasibly
go from now until Thanksgiving with a new nerdy movie each week. If anything,
it's an excellent distraction from the abrupt lack of daylight that hits us in
the Northern Hemisphere around this time every year.
Few films that made their debut
in 2013 have been so wrought with skepticism as Ender's Game. For every
gorgeous production still or positive update from the set that made its way
through the interwebs there was a collective cringing and sharp intake of air
through clenched teeth. It's already a difficult task to transmute a very
widely known and highly regarded work from one form of media to another; the
stakes are exponentially higher when the end product is primarily visual and
the crux of the beloved source material is the protagonist's internal monologue.
It's a classic example of 'hope for the best, brace for the worst.'
While there have been plenty of
movie adaptations of first-person novels, the narrative vantage is only one of
many reasons why Ender's Game was long considered to be 'unfilmable'. Not only
does a significant amount of the story development occur in Ender's headspace,
but most audiences do not take well to violence and deep-seated cynicism
playing out amongst a cadre of very young protagonists. Fancy that.
Furthermore, the novel itself is somewhat dense and circuitous, two characteristics that can
often be adequately explored in a TV series, but rarely in the time span
allotted to a feature film. Add to all of this a few decades of administrative shenanigans hampering development and a high probability that large swaths of
the target demographic would boycott the film due to disagreements with the
very publicly held personal beliefs of author Orson Scott Card.
Ok,
ok. So the question remains: did Ender's
Game successfully cast all that aside? Does it make a movie of such
'unfilmable' material? Short answer: sort of.
The movie does quite a bit right. The majority
of the casting is spot-on and the actors do a remarkable job capturing the
angst and moral dilemmas that were rife throughout the novel. Asa Butterfield
portrays the tactical prodigy Ender with borderline preternatural skill and
completely owns the role. Both Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley turn in
convincingly tight, gripping performances as Colonel Graff and Mazer Rackham
respectively while Moises Arias creates a genuine threat as Bonzo Madrid
The visual aspect of the film is
another plus point, with the creative team benefiting from Card's rather
sparse descriptions in the source text. The battle room is rendered with
especially brilliant care and the scenes shot therein are some of the movie's
best. Those instances where the action turns away from the blackness of space
are contrastingly lush and vibrant (in the case of Earth) or garish and
desiccated (the Formic home world). What we see of the orbital battle school
and all interstellar craft fit perfectly with what the original novel laid out
but also feel like legitimate extensions of existing technology, the latter
point can likely be attributed to Mr. Elon Musk, who consulted on the film.
The movie takes very concerted
pains to remain faithful to the source material, which we get to experience as
prominent visual details and numerous remarks, but the emotional weight of the
novel is wholly lost in the cinematic translation. The decision seems to have
been that the film would try to use brute force to overcome the challenges it
faced and power through the narrative at break-neck speed. The relentless
pacing does keep the audience engaged, but also prevents them from making any
sort of meaningful attachment to what they're seeing. Those who have read the
novel will understand what's going on and know who everyone is, but those who
haven't may be hard-pressed to care about certain characters and events when
they appear or are explained for only a few minutes at a time.
The pacing isn't enough to ruin Ender's Game, but it does make the
overall experience feel a bit hollow. Moreover, it can be frustrating to see
how close the movie came to being very good. It's also going to be interesting
to see how a sequel will be handled, if one ever gets made, since the protagonists
and events that make up many of the successor books garner either a few moments
of screen time or are not included at all. We get to meet Bean, but he only has
a handful of lines and the Demosthenes/Locke interplay between Ender's
siblings, Valentine and Peter, is omitted entirely. Understandably, not
everything in the book could be translated into the movie, but a handful of the
production choices will strike reader/viewers as odd.
All in all, a solid effort to
tackle some legitimately difficult material, but it falls lamentably short.
Overall Grade: C
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